The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music 9780822373469

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Refiguring American ­Music A series edited by Ronald Radano and Josh Kun Charles McGovern, contributing editor

Licia Fiol-­Matta

Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican M ­ usic

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2017

© 2017 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Book group Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Fiol-­Matta, Licia, author.  

Title: The ­great ­woman singer : gender and voice in Puerto Rican ­music / Licia Fiol-­Matta. Other titles: Refiguring American ­music. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Series: Refiguring American  ­music | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016031212 (print) lccn 2016034944 (ebook) isbn 9780822362821 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822362937 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 9780822373469 (e-­book) Subjects: lcsh: ­Women singers—­Puerto Rico. | ­Music—­Social aspects—­Puerto Rico. |  ­Music—­Political aspects—­Puerto Rico. Classification: lcc ml3917.p9 f56 2016 (print) | lcc ml3917.p9 (ebook) |   ddc 782.0092/52097295—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2016031212 Cover art: Portrait of Lucecita Benítez for the LP Soy de una raza pura, original in woodcut by Antonio Martorell, 1973.

A Lena Burgos-­Lafuente

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La música (lo supe entre una y otra tienda) era el perfume de un país, el recurso que quedaba a ese cuerpo emputrecido para hacerse presente de algún modo. Podía convertirse en anodina. Adelgazar hasta no ser notada. Coquetearía con su desgastamiento y, en determinado momento, se alzaría prístina, metería el punzonazo. antonio josé ponte

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CONTENTS

Acknowl­edgments

xi

introduction ​I Am Nothing

1

one ​Getting Off . . . ​the Nation

16

two ​So What If She’s Black?

67

three ​Techne and the Lady

121

four ​The Thinking Voice

172

Epilogue ​Nothing Is Something 226

Notes233



Bibliography269



Index279

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ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to engage with so many individuals and institutions that helped me out of sheer love for Puerto Rican ­music and the absolute certainty of its importance. My first thank you must go to maestro Antonio Martorell, for allowing me to use his beautiful image of Lucecita Benítez as the book’s cover. I honor the memory of Roxana Pagés Rangel and Marvette Pérez, staunch supporters of this book. Meeting up with them was always glorious. Thanks to Jossianna Arroyo, María Mercedes Carrión, Javier Guerrero, Lawrence La Fountain-­Stokes, Fred Moten, Juan Carlos Quintero-­Herencia, Julio Ramos, Milagros Ricourt, Raquel Z. Rivera, Rafael Rojas, Xavier Totti, and Alexandra Vazquez, who, at one time or another, lent concrete support to this proj­ect. I owe much to Ana María Ochoa Gautier, who enthusiastically backed my foray into m ­ usic studies. Thank you to my dear friends Ivette Hernández-­Torres and Luis Avilés for their incredible generosity in lending me their lovely home in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Over the years, their support truly amounted to the equivalent of a year’s fellowship. Similarly, Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel and Eugenio Frías-­Pardo have shared their pied-­à-­terre in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with me multiple times during the book’s last stages, making it pos­si­ble to conclude my work in a relaxed and welcoming environment. My bud José Quiroga is always on my intellectual horizon. I thank him for his endless acuity and unwavering friendship. He is f­ amily. Thanks to another queer b ­ rother, Arnaldo Cruz-­Malavé, for his constancy as much as his discerning capacity. Deborah Vargas and Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel have been ­great colleagues in the profession, impor­tant interlocutors, and fun, loyal friends. I have shared a steadfast personal and intellectual friendship with Ana María Dopico since we began our ­careers, back in the heady 1990s. Rubén Ríos ­Ávila has influenced my thinking for years. First I admired him from afar, for impossibly lucid lectures on baroque and neobaroque poetics; then I had the honor of participating in Latin American queer studies panels in the 1990s with him. He has been an intellectual rock for me. Arcadio Díaz

Quiñones is my first mentor, all the way back to my undergraduate years. He taught me how to look at creative works historically, without sacrificing their aesthetic heart or enlisting any artist in the ser­vice of dogma. I have purposefully tried to emulate Sylvia Molloy’s limpid-­yet-­hip scholarly style and her centering of the reader. Since her decisive engagement with gender studies in the 1980s, Sylvia has been the touchstone of an entire critical generation, to which I belong. Three dear friends w ­ ere deeply engaged with this work and remain pres­ent ­after their untimely passing. Leticia Stella Serra listened countless times to my ideas about this book and life in general in her lovely home at East 12th Street, not far from my own, in our beloved Manhattan. She faced a ­battle with ovarian cancer with g­ reat courage, teaching her “Fiolita” so much. José Esteban Muñoz was an absolutely unique person as well as luminous thinker. I ­will always expect to receive a text or e-­mail with his witty nuggets, his gentle jabs, and his “You know I adore you.” Thank you, my dear Mara Negrón, for your brilliance, grace, and affection. I had looked forward to many more years of meeting in San Juan, New York, and Paris con Ernesto, Lena, y los muchachos, Rubén y Javier . . . ​I miss you so very much. I am happy to fi­nally be able to thank the generous individuals who assisted me in all manner of archival inquiries and helped me in obtaining primary material. At the Archivo General de Puerto Rico, I thank María Isabel Rodríguez Matos and Marcos Nieves. Thanks to Tamara Yantín Ayala, Alfonso Giménez Porrata, and Pedro Malavet Vega for assisting me with Ponce-­ related queries. Thanks to John Pennino of the Metropolitan Opera Archives, Rob Hudson of the Car­ne­gie Hall Archives, Yvonne Rivera Piccorelli of the Biblioteca Legislativa del Senado de Puerto Rico, Carlos Rivera of the Library of Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, Miguel Vega of the Colección Puerto­ rriqueña, Luis Rosario Albert of the Archivos TuTV de Puerto Rico, David Morales of the Cuatro Proj­ect, and Pedro Juan Hernández of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. For timely consults or assistance with archival materials, thanks to Eliseo Colón Zayas, Edgardo Huertas, David Marrero, Talía Rivera, Tristana Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, and Rafael Viera. I wish to render a tribute to the now-­defunct Casa Viera in Santurce, Puerto Rico, where I regularly spent time perusing cds and talking to collectors. Thanks to two dear friends in Havana, Cuba, Sigfredo Ariel and Norge Espinosa, and my close friends Gabriela Cano and Patricia Vega for welcoming me in their home at the Colonia del Valle, Mexico City, while I pursued research queries in Mexico. ­There is no way to overstate the importance of archival collections to this work. My most impor­tant archival research sites w ­ ere the Díaz-­Ayala Cuban xii 

Acknowl­e dgments

and Latin American Popu­lar ­Music Collection, Florida International University, and the Colección Puertorriqueña of the University of Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras. I spent a charmed week at fiu and wish to thank the ­great librarians, especially Verónica González, for their assistance. I spent a ­couple of years, in the aggregate, at the Colección Puertorriqueña, a trea­sure trove for all Puerto Rican studies researchers. Its existence made this research affordable and it is my hope the Colección w ­ ill be supported so other researchers can take as much advantage of its wonderful resources. I also thank the Archivo del Municipio de Arecibo, the Archivos TuTV de Puerto Rico, the Archivo General de Puerto Rico, the Fundación Nacional para la Cultura Popu­lar, and the Ateneo Puertorriqueño. Warm thanks to the wonderful staff at the Archivo Histórico de Caguas. Pride of place goes to the ­people I interviewed over the course of ten years or with whom I spoke on the phone to fill out my knowledge about the four singers covered. Th ­ ese conversations ­were both crucial and im­mensely rewarding. While grateful ac­know­ledg­ments appear throughout the book, up front I must name the following: for chapter 1, heartfelt thanks to Velda González de Modestti, Helen Monroig, and Mariano Artau, who have since passed on; and to Glenn Monroig, Awilda Silva, and Miguel Angel Hernández. For chapter 2, I thank Silvia Álvarez Curbelo for an importantly clarifying conversation, and for her interest in this book; I also cherish the memory of interviewing Ruth Fernández herself. For chapter 3, effusive thanks to Carmen Ortiz, Joaquín Mouliert “El Pitirre de Fajardo,” Luis Miranda “El Pico de Oro,” and Egberto Almenas. For chapter 4, warm thanks to Ida de Jesús, Edna Rivera, Pedro Rivera Toledo, Javier Santiago, Gabriel Suau, and Roberto Tirado. A group of individuals stand out in my gratitude. I truly struck gold when I found two ideal collaborators, Arturo Butler and Grego Marcano. Mr. Butler is a diehard fan of La Calandria and recalls taping her singing live in the bodega of his block in the Bronx while a young boy. I cannot thank him enough for letting me have copies of his personal collection of Calandria 78-­rpm recordings. Marcano is the son of Piquito Marcano and steward of his ­father’s legacy. Aside from obtaining impor­tant rec­ords and cds, which ­were out of print and very difficult to find, I am very grateful to Grego for allowing me to use much of the visual material in chapter 3. Roberto Silva, who continues the art of decimar in Puerto Rico and mentors dozens of young decimistas, did not hesitate to share his contacts and thanks to him I was able to talk to several of the ­greats of jíbaro ­music. Osvaldo Rivera, archivist extraordinaire of the Radio Universidad de Puerto Rico, had just received the bulk of the Tommy Acknowl­e dgments 

xiii

Muñiz Collection and was in the m ­ iddle of pro­cessing the entire deposit when I contacted him. He shared his wonderful space with me for several days, a small office with two computers and vari­ous audiovisual machines where I could view items in older formats. Fi­nally, an extended interview with Mita Torres proved to be one of the highlights of my research and a turning point in my thinking for chapter 4. I thank Mita for her time as well as for sharing invaluable archival materials that together helped me understand an entire artistic group of signal importance. I wish to acknowledge the support I received in the form of grants from the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York (psc-­cuny), through their Faculty Research Awards program; the cuny-­Caribbean Exchange Program, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York, through their Puerto Rican Diaspora Grants; the cuny Diversity Proj­ects Development Fund, City University of New York; and the Díaz-­Ayala Travel Grant of the Cuban Research Institute and the Libraries at Florida International University. José Quiroga, Juana María Rodríguez, Arlene Dávila, and Arnaldo Cruz-­Malavé read early portions of the manuscript and provided their typically lucid suggestions. Thanks as well to the anonymous readers for their invaluable feedback. Much gratitude goes to the Refiguring American ­Music series editors, Ronald Radano and Josh Kun. I greatly benefited from the legendary editorial acumen of my editor at Duke, Ken Wissoker. Yvette Nevares, my good friend, helped me im­mensely with the preparation of camera-­ready artwork for the book. I am deeply grateful to the audiences that attended talks at vari­ous universities and conferences while I was researching and writing this book, and the colleagues who invited me. During the very final stage of production, I enjoyed the gracious assistance of Wilfredo José Burgos Matos. My amazing ­sister-­in-­law Louise Murray has been not only ­family but also one of my closest friends for over two de­cades now, and a source of support through some very trying times. I also wish to acknowledge the sustaining presence of my adored nieces Najda Galib-­Fiol and Zaimar Galib-­Fiol, my ­brother-­in-­law Hamid Galib, and all my nephews and nieces over a ­couple of generations. My ­music education began in my childhood home. My ­father, Juan Fiol Bigas, had a large rec­ord collection; he loved Caruso, Belafonte, marching band ­music, and opera. My ­mother, Emma Matta Méndez, loved all ­music, from classical to pop­u­lar. She took me to the Festival Casals, my first live operas (Aida and Carmen, when I was about six years old), and numerous xiv 

Acknowl­e dgments

concerts and open-­air events, including the unforgettable open-­air, ­free concert Lucecita Benítez gave in La Puntilla in 1975. My ­sister Liana played the accordion; from her twenties on, she sang with the choir (her passion to this day). As a l­ ittle kid I received letters from my s­ ister Liza recounting her college visits to the opera in Washington, DC. L ­ ater I could not wait for Saturday to arrive, so I could spend the after­noon in her apartment in Hato Rey, where I would listen, wide-­eyed, to her myriad tales about m ­ usic and musicians. A gifted guitarist and singer, a wondrous musical store­house and erudite, Liza is without a doubt the single most impor­tant influence on my experience of, and thinking about, m ­ usic. My b ­ rother Juan played the trombone and brought late-1960s and early-1970s rock to my ears, including some of my perennial favorites (like the Moody Blues, A Question of Balance), played in his snazzy hi-fi stereo that he carted with him from college a few precious summer months a year. My ­sister Lynn never left the ­house without her guitar. I heard her sing with her guitar e­ very single day of my childhood. She played her favorite rec­ords like any true fan, over and over. Thanks to her I listened to La Calandria and learned to re­spect jíbaro m ­ usic. My b ­ rother Antonio played the trumpet and was a huge fan of Chicago; I know “Only the Beginning,” “25 or 6 to 4,” and “Does Anyone R ­ eally Know What Time It Is?” by heart. My ­sister Lía phoned Radio Uno e­ very day to vote for her favorite artists and ask the dj to play her favorite songs. Our f­amily owned a rec­ord player that we ­children had to share among so many budding audiophiles, and I remember how Lía and I discussed which songs we w ­ ere ­going to play in “our” turn. Since I idolized her, I always agreed with her se­lection. I still idolize her. My ­brother Carlos and I shared all our childhood years and m ­ usic was a common language. We w ­ ere religious in our weekly listening to the American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. Carlos bought progressive and punk rec­ords for his collection, although I had no idea as a kid that that’s what the bands ­were called. He also gave me my first vinyls (I ­didn’t own many more, being an ’80s-­cassette fiend): Donna Summer’s Bad Girls and Live and More. A la familia Fiol-­Matta, gracias por el regalo de toda la música. As I began to write this book, I met Lena Burgos-­Lafuente, whose musical knowledge is astonishingly capacious and who also comes from a ­music-­loving ­family. She captivated me from the moment I heard her voice. She exponentially increased my listening with her loving play­lists and huge mp3 collection. Thanks to her, I became more conversant about bolero, salsa, flamenco, décima, jazz, post-­punk . . . ​She is the most perceptive and original thinker I know. I’m hooked. This book is for her. Acknowl­e dgments 

xv

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INTRODUCTION

I AM NOTHING In 1969, at the height of the Cold War, the Puerto Rican singer Lucecita Benítez won the First Festival of Latin Song in the World with her per­for­ mance of “Génesis”: Cuando nada en la tierra quede que tibie el sol Cuando nadie en la tierra quede que evoque a Dios Cuando sobre la tierra no haya ya ni dolor Solo habrá una lumbre y esa será el amor ¡El amor, el amor! ¡Para empezar! When nothing is left on Earth to feel the warmth of the sun When no one is left on Earth to invoke God When not even pain ­will be felt on Earth ­There ­will only be a flame and that flame ­will be love Love, Love! To begin again! Considering its lugubrious content, it seems odd, more than forty years ­later, that the m ­ usic industry and listening public frantically celebrated “nothingness” in this very melodramatic way. The muscular symphonic orchestra rushed to keep pace with the singer who had appeared, seemingly, out of nowhere and literally came out of the nowhere that was Puerto Rico to Latin Amer­i­ca, the United States, and the world. Ironically, the singer’s name means l­ ittle light, akin to the flame of love that rises ­after the apocalypse’s destruction in the last, triumphant bars of the song. It is not the name her friends and f­amily use to address her: She is Luz, Luz Esther, or Lucy. Lucecita is a stage name, a diminutive that always has seemed not quite right for this mercurial singer, and yet also on the mark in Latin American Spanish as a signifier for the enormous affection she has evoked in generations of Puerto Ricans. “Lucecita” incorporates the love that the song

names as the world’s salvation —­ resonating with the adoration the singer easily provoked —­ but it also contains a kernel of societal diminution, mockery, and domestication: ­women as marginal, minor, and suspect. The song attempted to re-­create beginning and end, alpha and omega, genesis and dissolution. It was a response to both the terrifying prospect of global, nuclear annihilation, and the colonial condition of Puerto Rico that diminished social life. It stands as a testament to the increasing paranoia of the small colony, its anguish expressed as an anxiety over its smallness and presumptive incapacity to affect its destiny or the world’s. “Génesis” also entailed a subliminal protest of the topsy-­turvy gender and sexual world which the star, paradoxically enough, embodied in her dashing tuxedo and grippingly loud vocal volume. Its author, fellow Puerto Rican Guillermo Venegas Lloveras, found himself suddenly owing his major triumph to a masculine ­woman, one the public did not know how to read. At the dawn of her ­career, she was often described as “boyish” or “androgynous.” In 1969, she disconcerted all of Latin Amer­i­ca by presenting as mannish. Venegas Lloveras could not have foreseen the artist’s eruption onto the world stage with his song, since she had been a wondrous but inoffensive and “feminine” youth star up ­until that moment. He prob­ably never ­imagined that his status as the songwriter of “Génesis” would become subordinate to the performer’s. In a ­music industry practice that is not yet quite extinct, singers functioned as the placeholders for someone ­else’s genius. Furthermore, that genius was invariably male, ­whether the songwriter’s, musician’s, or bandleader’s. Lucecita had transformed Venegas Lloveras’s predictable song into a watershed sonic and visual event. She had single-­handedly put Puerto Rico on the map. She was the one the adoring public rushed to see when the winning cohort returned to Puerto Rico. She was the figure that admiring singers and musicians came to re­spect. It is telling that in his 1992 memoir, Venegas Llo­ veras wrote, “Total genius is men’s priority. A true man is he who can penetrate every­thing. ­Women ­were born for flirting, not for knowledge; to be dominated, not to dominate; to give c­ hildren, not ideas. Do you know of a single ­woman who has attained the status of Thinker? A single ­woman who has shaken or altered the intellectual conscience of the world? Do you know of a single ­woman possessing an unparalleled probing capacity [inigualable pene­ tración]?”1 “Génesis” expressed extreme male melancholy, yet a masculine ­woman unexpectedly delivered this affect home. The songwriter’s lament for ­women and men who did not conform to the expected roles of a misogynistic 2 Introduction

and homophobic society, who dared usurp the masculine domains —­ ­music among them —­ throws into the sharpest of relief just how vexed ­women’s incursion into pop ­music can be. In Lucecita’s case, no scripts ­were available to subordinate and tame her eruption. She was not feminine. She did not sing softly or croon about heterosexual love. She claimed the masculine prerogatives of expressing social and po­liti­cal ideas outside of marriage and motherhood, eschewing the roles that her man­ag­ers sought to implant in her earliest persona. When it came to representing difference, decked in her stage costume that night in Mexico and armed with her mind-­blowing delivery, she proved she had no intention of merely supplying a commercial hook to sell songs. Lucecita Benítez would become an international icon in only a c­ ouple of years; would survive attempts to erase her c­ areer and silence her magnificent voice; would claim her right to speak and not merely to sing; and would refuse all imperatives to civility, moralism, and even proper nationalist per­for­mance. In her l­ater ­career, all the way forward to the 1990s, she would be baptized the National Voice of Puerto Rico in the simulacrum of late colonial society, when difference did become a commodity and nationalism coexisted with —­ indeed fueled —­ Banco Popu­lar tele­vi­sion specials honoring the ­people, selling brands and financial products more than songs and ­music. Lucecita’s ­career arc is like a crash course in history combined with an embodiment of the crucible voice can throw us into. The absolute nothing of dissolution, of ceasing to be, which “Génesis” evoked, gave way to the relative nothing that the singer claimed for herself, when she informed the public that it could not dictate what she was. “I am nothing,” she said in 1974, furiously and presciently. She was not legibility, but potentiality. She could not be generalized: She was singular. That’s what she meant when she said, “I am nothing.” Lucecita troubled several paradigms that have dictated m ­ atters when it comes to ­women’s ­careers as pop singers, in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in Latin Amer­i­ca. Almost all ­women who entered pop when the pop ­music business began did so ­under some kind of pressure to perform values —­ ­whether of the moral kind, nationalism, the home and reproduction, or liberationist politics. Lucecita was not the only singer in Puerto Rico who had troubled morality, class-­defined participation in ­music, or politics. In this book, I discuss three other ­women who, each in their own way, did so too. And ­there are ­others. However, Lucecita was, decidedly, one of the first w ­ omen singers who broke I Am Nothing  3

out of any possibility of being described as a “­great ­woman singer.” The qualifier did not make any sense a­ fter her triumph with “Génesis”; she became a ­great singer, period. This meteoric rise did not solve prob­lems for the artist so much as it created an excruciating existence where she found herself increasingly dissatisfied with the content of her repertoire, to the point of asking herself, “Why am I singing this nonsense?”2 The answer is more complex than resorting to a straightforward repressive paradigm, to recall Foucault’s critique of how power operates.3 The “­great ­woman singer” reveals the procedures of the pop ­music singing ­career established as an arc, a feat of determination and stamina, a fight to the death with oversignification, a zealous, successful stewardship of persona, and the ultimately successful defense of the voice. It also reveals the toils of the biopo­liti­cal uses of voice within a collectivity, and the “distribution of the sensible” that makes plain an inside/outside partition.4 The book aims squarely at a critique of the logic of the exceptional —­ still the critical rule in dominant accounts, despite commonsense knowledge about marquee artists who ­were ­women since the nascent days of the pop ­music industry in the region, back in the 1930s or so. The ­Great ­Woman Singer refuses to espouse a predetermined idea of what is feminist in ­music, nor does it seek to theorize what this standard of feminism in m ­ usic might be. It is not a survey of w ­ omen in m ­ usic or a tracing of re­sis­tance by ­women to the strictures of dominant ­music making. My interest in the female pop m ­ usic star is about querying instances where singularity erupts despite heterosexism and misogyny, through the vehicle of voice. My goal is to disrupt the normative business of scholarly studies on w ­ omen artists. Overall, I aim to ­really listen to ­women’s voices, in the sense of paying attention to their conceptual dimension, away from notions of natu­ral or intuitive per­for­mance. I detail how four paradigmatically iconic artists elaborated their concept, troubling the gaze on their figures as ­simple manifestations of artistic serendipity or, alternatively, as creations made pos­si­ble by male insufflations of spirit. The book narrates their histories and analyzes their work outside the poverty of critical tools and the near-­universal gesture of dismissing ­women artists as merely ­women singers.5 Yet, it’s not as easy as merely rejecting or ironizing the epithet, however much we may wish it gone from our consciousness. The ideology we seek to disrupt influences our apprehension of ­these voices, inescapably. If we do not critically isolate this prob­lem of the collectivity —­ this imposition of acritical listening —­ we ­won’t be able to dispel it.6 The grouping, 4 Introduction

then, of ­these four artists qua ­women is a function of the hermeneutic: a move to unsettle m ­ atters, not to reaffirm them. Speaking of the voice as if it ­were not in actuality covered by gender (riffing on Hortense Spillers, who spoke of a subject “covered by race”)7 is simply to contribute to the further buttressing of the status quo we see verified in books on Latin pop­u­lar ­music, which to this day only name Celia Cruz and La Lupe, usually in passing, in their surveys; or in university courses on Latin American pop­u­lar ­music that can run for years without studying any ­women artists; or in the rec­ord store, however vanishing, that includes a section on w ­ omen, which ­women are expected to browse and men should not approach lest they be taken for members of “the gender vanquished for all time, ­women.”8 Po­liti­cally speaking, the Cold War had crossed Lucecita’s per­for­mance of “Génesis” in a chilling way. The prospect of nuclear war lent a hair-­raising quality to the last verse of the song, “Sólo habrá una lumbre” (­there ­will only be a flame). Regardless of w ­ hether the flame represented love, listeners ­were clearly preoccupied with extinction, with war. Several g­ reat ­women singers had labored within the protocols of the Good Neighbor policy and the Cold War, becoming ­either goodwill ambassadors performing the folklore of Latin Amer­i­ca, like Libertad Lamarque; steamy sex symbols, like Carmen Miranda; or maternal stalwarts in Mexican movies, like Rita Montaner (although this ­great star was burdened with problematic “black” roles, such as the “mammy” figure of the 1948 Angelitos negros [­Little black angels]). In this book, I refrain from making value judgments on any decisions to represent, preferring to investigate ­matters in terms of their historicity: what was allowed or pos­si­ble, individual temperaments, and voice operating in the realm of the f­ uture perfect. The ­future perfect is the time of the arkhé, according to Giorgio Agamben: The arkhé ­towards which archaeology regresses must not be understood in any way as an ele­ment that can be situated in chronology (not even one with a large grid, of the sort used in pre-­history); it is, rather, a force that operates in history —­ much in the same way in which Indoeu­ro­pean words express a system of connections among historically accessible languages; in which the child in psychoanalysis expresses an active force in the psychic life of the adult; in which the big bang, which is supposed to have originated the universe, continues to send ­towards us its fossil radiation. But the arkhé is not a datum or a substance —­ dif­fer­ent from the big bang, to which the astrophysicists I Am Nothing  5

try to assign a date, even if it is in terms of millions of years. It is much rather a field of bipolar historical currents within the tension of anthropogenesis and history, between the point of emergence and becoming, between arch-­past and pres­ent. And as such —­ that is to say, to the extent to which it is, as anthropogenesis itself, something that is necessarily supposed to have factually happened, and which yet cannot be hypostatized in any chronologically identifiable event —­ it is solely capable of guaranteeing the intelligibility of historical phenomena, of “saving” them archeologically within a ­future perfect, yet not grasping its (in any case unverifiable) origin, but rather its history, at once finite and untotalizable.9 When it came to war and pop ­music, Lucecita troubled paradigms too. In early interviews, when she was a youth star, she had spoken out against the Vietnam War: “What’s happening in Puerto Rican ­music is happening all over the world. We love in­de­pen­dence and have a rebellious spirit. For instance, we are against the draft and we can make that part of our ­music. Why should we fight for something that does not concern us? Some p ­ eople are looking for adventure but, t­ here are so many dead Puerto Ricans and for what? For nothing, it is not our quarrel. I for one am against all t­ hese impositions.”10 H ­ ere we have an example of a disquieting, societal “nothingness” that is not the same artistic and po­liti­cal “nothing” she ­later claimed. In “Génesis,” Lucecita eschewed the edifice of goodwill. She presented as anything but folkloric in sartorial terms. Musically, she unleashed a power­ful balada that departed from the esteemed Pan-­Americanist bolero. Lucecita’s per­for­mance of “Génesis” did not offer the “Latin American” sound, or the “American” sound of her youthful lps. Even the theme of the song —­ planetary trauma —­ hardly corresponded to the usual fare ­women sang all over the hemi­sphere. Most ­women’s pop hits ­were about failed heterosexual romances; hardly any w ­ ere about the state of the world. That discourse was reserved for po­liti­cal song, which knew one “­great ­woman singer” of its own by 1969, the Chilean Violeta Parra. Yet Parra became encased in the well-­worn, gendered narratives of doomed love affairs and an unspecified depressive personality. I am resolutely not interested in indicting any singer’s po­liti­cal stances, or in interpreting any ­career as a reflection of personal woes. Critical biography is a mode of analy­sis in this book ­because, from a Benjaminian perspective, the “biographical historicity of an individual” contains what is allegorical in their life and therefore is an ave­nue to grasping the arkhé, what in history 6 Introduction

is “untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful . . . ​expressed in a face, or rather in a skull.”11 Keying into the ­career of ­women singers must entail this approach to history for three reasons: Their histories have not been written, nor a general history of a collective subject; it is hard to piece together the a­ ctual sources of ­these histories, necessitating a method that w ­ ill privilege the question over the answer; although associated with freedom and play, ­music ­careers in given contexts are very tough and often unsuccessful, notwithstanding the existence of talent. If we add to this ­women’s dominant treatment as all nature, as body, animal, and so forth, the Benjaminian allegory emerges as not only suitable but also urgent. In reconstructing an archive of voice, I do address and in certain cases redress the prob­lems of omission, politics of memory, and, last but not least, plainly sexist approaches to pop­u­lar ­music that still hold sway in pop­u­lar culture. Yet my purpose is to examine embodied existences within the very dense grid of significations in which multiple subjectivities circulate, which includes ­music producers, arrangers, entrepreneurs, politicians, fans, and citizens who are not especially attracted to ­music. ­Women singers ­labor along the twin poles of adoration and derision. With the complexity of such affects in mind, I cite singers from Puerto Rico as paradigmatic for Latin American and American Studies. Adoration is presumptively benign, but the widely regarded positive aspects of ­music per­for­mance require critical attention, in order to detect their “patterning” effects.12 We associate derision with disciplinary power. Examining contempt, aside from charting its obvious negative impact on ­careers, also affords insights into collective fantasy, which pop ­women singers symbolize in an easily consumable and shareable way. In this book, I examine the reining in, ordering, correcting, or training of ­women’s vocal per­for­mances, but also the lines of flight opened up in ­these per­for­ mances, their écarts and silences. All the ­women I named in the preceding section, from the more straightforwardly po­liti­cal to the more conservative, w ­ ere “­great ­women singers” ­because a thinking voice took up residence in their ­careers, unleashing questions and providing answers —­ consciously or not —­ in response to the cultural moment of their times. In this book, a narrative ­toward elucidating how voice calls to thought unfolds, ­until the thinking voice appears fully formed in chapter 4. I mimic the qualities of “­future perfect” that the voice in ­music per­for­mance must have, presenting the reader with a prob­lem that takes its time in becoming graspable or knowable. Sidestepping dominant notions of I Am Nothing  7

voice, particularly notation (as in the highbrow musical pedagogy that recognizes voice solely as a musical instrument) and intuition (the widespread notion that a singer trades not in conceptual thinking, but only in spontaneous execution), I come to isolate the performing voice as an object (thinking voice in per­for­mance), while advancing the study of voice as thought producer (presenting the voice as it thinks, riffing on Martin Heidegger’s treatise What Is Called Thinking?). Chapter 1 details Jacques Lacan’s treatment of the voice as part object or objet a. In a nutshell, the part object exists as both an illusion and its foil. I employ the part object to indicate the breach between associations of voice with plenitude and the real­ity that voice, in the last instance, represents lack or, to put it more colloquially, a puzzling absence that must be reckoned with and is not pacified by enjoyment (which musical voice represents for most listeners). Applied to the voice, the part object entails separating from accounts of the voice as always already knowable, as certain, and focusing on its status as having “no specular image, no alterity.”13 The rest of the book follows this template, establishing a relationship to the archive but not allowing it to dictate interpretation. I have had in mind, among ­others, Sylvia Molloy, who pithily stated, It is true that archival work is absolutely necessary as a starting point for any reflection on gender. But I would like to think that ­those of us who work on this unstable category of gender do it from gender more than in gender; that we are attempting to articulate, not just a reflection on gender, but a re-­flexion (if I can be allowed the word game ­here), that is to say, a new flexion in the Latin American cultural text (in that text’s totality, not in select parts) that ­will allow us to read other­wise, in many dif­f er­ent “other­wises.”14 While the book is, in a certain sense, an archive, bringing into painstaking play both sonorous and nonsonorous items from the past (and as such thinks from an archive), it is, above all, a critical theorization of voice and gender, with an anchor in psychoanalytic thought without being exclusively psychoanalytic. In “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis” (1912), Sigmund Freud explained the nature of psychoanalytic listening, which specialists often refer to as “distracted” or “wavering” listening: “[It] consists simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in par­tic­u­lar and in maintaining the same ‘evenly suspended attention’ . . . ​in the face of all that one hears. . . . ​To put it in a formula: [The analyst] must turn his own uncon8 Introduction

scious like a receptive organ ­toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone.”15 Peter Szendy usefully paraphrases Freud, closer to our purposes: “If I summon ­here the expression ‘wavering listening,’ it is of course b ­ ecause I am thinking of Freud’s famous phrase, a phrase that might basically be saying this: the sense of a discourse is not a given to be deciphered, but must be constructed conjointly by the one who utters it and by the one who listens to it. It obviously does not go without saying that this psychoanalytic listening can be translated into the vocabulary and practice of musical listening.”16 As in Freud’s technological meta­phors, this book’s method imitates “the telephone adjusted to the microphone” and listens distractedly to all available objects in the sound archive. ­Needless to say, some sounds are distorted or missing. ­Others are too loud. Singers d ­ on’t always speak into the microphone. And so it goes. An archive might give a sense of plenitude and illusion of mastery, but I have worked with its incompleteness and contingency in mind. I could also not include every­thing I encountered: A pro­cess of se­lection and indeed forgetting had to take place. Without the latter, I would have encountered a disquieting “nothing to say.” Relatively ignored, local ­music had been of passing interest to the Spanish imperial state. At the dawn of Puerto Rico’s second colonial period, in the early twentieth ­century, professional ethnologists bolstered their credentials in managing imperial subjects through ethnographic recordings. Photojournalists trained in the American Works Pro­gress Administration (wpa) presented the occasional portrait of the native musician. Columbia and rca Victor pressed 78s according to the racist conception of ethnic m ­ usic that Ruth Glasser encapsulates in her classic, My ­Music Is My Flag: “The rec­ord companies persisted through the years in treating Puerto Ricans and other ethnic audiences as dumb animals with an unreasonable instinct for ­music, or at best as mere sale ciphers.”17 The prócer (founding f­ather), the Spanish-­born Manuel Fernández Juncos, cleaned up the lyr­ics of the revolutionary anthem into the official version of “La Borinqueña” in 1903. He si­mul­ta­neously churned out w ­ holesome ­children’s ditties to be sung by rote by schoolchildren suffering from Spanish being intermittently, yet consistently, banned in instruction. The peasant figure, the jíbaro, was characterized as having only one talent —­ ­music —­ while Afro–­Puerto Ricans ­were tasked with the entertainment of elites. Both ­were I Am Nothing  9

folklorized. Musical pedagogy evolved around Eu­ro­pean classical ­music and for de­cades was taught as the only ­music worth studying in a formal setting. ­Women in Puerto Rican m ­ usic occupied a decidedly minoritarian place in the sounded world, being, in discourse and in the aggregate, representative of the qualities that made up the presumed secondariness of pop —­ capable, at best, of incidental ­music in the classical vein. The state invested pop­u­lar ­music with a degree of power and prestige upon the establishment of the Estado Libre Asociado (ela, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) in 1952. Controlling pedagogical channels from primary school to higher education, shaping markets ­after the ela, creating the country’s Institute for Puerto Rican Culture and other cultural institutions to advance its agenda, the state largely succeeded in its quest to employ m ­ usic as palliative; revenue-­generating arm of tourism to provide the needed “local color”; and card to assure investors that Puerto Rico was “peaceful” and, as such, represented a safe haven for investors. The climax of the state’s success in controlling the musical happened in the 1950s and 1960s, captured in the 1957 David Ogilvy advertising campaign for the Festival Casals de Puerto Rico, “Pablo Casals is coming home —­ to Puerto Rico,” paid for by the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (figure I.1). Naturally, the state could never control all of the arenas that affect touches, even if that is its sustaining fiction. The per­for­mance space is one arena where the designs of mandated enjoyment might falter. In this book, I trace both mandated enjoyment and when its designs fail. I unpack enjoyment’s de­pen­ dency on the performing, female body and detail when, how, and why vari­ous forms of control short-­cir­cuit, despite their certainty of managing w ­ omen. I examine, in equal mea­sure, the advantages of ­music as a profession where some ­women could craft a space of artistic expression, and the limitations of their ­careers in ­music. With the ela, song opened up to female stars, who ­were still regarded as exceptions. What was thought of as feminine subjectivity was barely considered a locus for creativity. As to ­women singers specifically, they entertained. They did not think. The lives and works I have selected came to exceed power’s advantages as well as the limits power imposes. Hence their singularity. They also became uncannily aligned with standardized ­music genres, immediately putting them in touch with larger cultural scripts. As w ­ omen who persevered in the face of a world that denied them the hallowed space of the artist, ­women who succeeded as professionals but also became icons, the four artists studied in this book give the lie to normative functions of m ­ usic, showing the 10 Introduction

figure i.1 ​Ad, “Pablo Casals is coming home —­ to Puerto Rico,” New Yorker, February 2, 1957. The government of Puerto Rico sought to advertise the island to foreign investors and tourists by promoting a festival of classical ­music, signifying refinement and civilization. Reputedly this single ad helped to boost tourist expenditures by the millions. Removing the cellist from the picture avoided the risk of “visual bromide.”

parallel ability of m ­ usic to disrupt and reorder a variety of injunctions, among them how enjoyment should proceed and where, how patriotic allegiances should be expressed, how obscenity should appear in the repertoire, how politics should enter m ­ usic lyr­ics, and how consumption should become the main activity of subjects in capitalism. As elsewhere, the Puerto Rican musical constellation has many more ­women singers than I can study ­here, many excellent in their own right, many beginning full-­fledged ­careers around the founding of the ela in 1952. They have loyal fans and successful rec­ords, despite the industry’s prejudiced practice of limiting the number of w ­ omen recording artists b ­ ecause they felt that ­women did not sell rec­ords since ­women did not buy rec­ords. However, the I Am Nothing  11

four chapters pres­ent four ­careers that are singular within this context, which merit a distinct grouping to consider voice, gender, power, and thought. Chapter 1, “Getting Off . . . ​the Nation,” reviews Myrta Silva’s (1927–1987) stellar ­music ­career. I detail how the artist was able to wrest the dominant perception of a problematic female performing body and create a highly autonomous and conceptual intervention, which I theorize as a cynical ethics. This meeting ground of Jacques Lacan’s ethics and Michel Foucault’s parrhesia focuses on the relationship between speech and song. Contra Jacques Derrida’s famous critique of the autoaffectivity of voice in Voice and Phenomenon, which assigned voice a metaphysical burden that it simply could not shake off, Myrta Silva as figure and her simultaneous practices of parlando and self-­reference mock the very idea of autoaffectivity and provide a template from which to examine similar uses of speech-­song and self-­referential lyr­ics. This chapter sets up an extended meditation on the obscene as the obverse of a cleaned-up repertoire, as the stage from which to construct an approach to the symbolic capacities of voice. The star female body veers from being apprehended as a beautiful object visually to becoming a visual disturbance in multiple ways, while her vocal capacity to enthrall through play with voice’s role in the symbolic order dispenses with notions of the beautiful as the needed identity of presumptively female pop ­music. Voice is installed in thought instead. Silva proved that an exceptional pop voice is one that knows how to foreground listening. I examine Silva’s voice also as a tele­vi­sion producer, host, gossip columnist, and social chronicler, which together comprise the totality of her figure and represent the multifaceted aspects of voice. The chapter rescues her musicality from accounts that have buried it, examining her repertoire of self-­ referential songs, many obscene, and articulated almost completely around word play. Concomitant with a psychoanalytic understanding of voice as part object, the treatment of words is not just semantic but sounded. Of all the singers studied in this book, Silva comes closest to having carefully thought her singing. Chapter 2, “So What If She’s Black?,” discusses Ruth Fernández (1919–2012), a black contralto working in pop genres whose nostalgic self-­narrative of star inception would point us to a linear account of pro­gress from early U.S. empire to the modern Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. An unusual call, “So what if I’m black?,” is the center of a preoccupation over being, the classic analytic quandary. This call is not a statement as much as a demand, for recognition as much as reparation. It is difficult to decipher. The protestation indicates a 12 Introduction

permanent suspension in which metaphysical and ontological questions are never settled. While race is an impor­tant analytic in chapter 1, it takes center stage in chapter 2, not primarily b ­ ecause the singer was black (although this is no small detail in a racist society) but ­because the singer’s entire ­career is threaded around this cry and its attendant societal questions: What are you, and why are you? Are you a w ­ oman? Should you exist as a singer? Dialogical models are put to the test in a radically unequal structure of interlocution. I isolate intra-­and intergroup interpellations figured in songs, together fissuring the oneness of the polity that “nationalist sonorousness” attempted to manufacture in the early days of developmentalism in Puerto Rico and through its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s (as elsewhere in Latin Amer­i­ca).18 ­Here the star female body is routinely derided as unsuitable visually and attractive sonically. The chapter’s twist is this subject’s entry into the certifiably po­liti­cal sphere, where she helped install a conservative mode of thinking via pop ­music, manipulating the listener as shrewdly as chapter 1’s exemplar even if, ultimately, her decisions might have restricted the freedom of her m ­ usic. Chapter 3, “Techne and the Lady,” pivots to migration and m ­ usic. It seeks to prove the solidity and importance of more modest forms of the star female body, and their crucial role in the larger structure of which they are a part, refuting the general notion that huge sales numbers and big markets alone determine fame. Each Latin American nation has its own set of local stars, like Ernestina Reyes, La Calandria (1925–1994), who perhaps did not reach hemispheric fame but w ­ ere critical to localized musical politics. Th ­ ese stars often found their reception in cir­cuits excluded from ­today’s archive of ­music, which mostly rec­ords ­middle-­class practices of middlebrow culture and middlebrow attempts to enter musical culture considered high in the pedagogical imagination of ­music (classical ­music). In this scheme, country m ­ usic mattered only as occasional spice or entertainment, or as values vessel. Country musicians often w ­ ere forced to create personas that w ­ ere buffoons or dim-­ witted. Some knowledge of their practices is available in manuals of folkloric ­music, anthropological investigations into instruments, preserved ditties, and folk songs, all studied within the matrix of the national pop­u­lar. Focusing on local cir­cuits of exchange that underwrite the star female body in Latin American country m ­ usics dislodges the primacy of lettered interpretations, and their moralizing injunction ­toward collective repre­sen­ta­tion, in ­favor of an aesthetics of the moment favoring bricolage and invention. La Calandria mobilized a prototypical ­women’s folk voice, similar in color and texture to ­those found in flamenco, perico ripiao merengue, or Mexican rancheras (the latter was a I Am Nothing  13

favorite genre of the singer’s and her working-­class audience). Calandria was fun loving and unconventional, embodying country m ­ usic’s class-­defined aesthetics, which seemed garish and uncouth to elite listeners but ­were delightful to the working-­class audiences of Puerto Rico and New York. She pursued her ­free-­wheeling, party-­going ethics in the jíbaro milieu, which was more permissive and elastic than ­middle-­class, highly capitalized entertainment, thus putting an accent on the pres­ent and undercutting the state’s tight conceptualization of temporality and ­women’s role in its reproduction. Chapter 4, “The Thinking Voice,” grows out of the three preceding chapters, which lay out an argument for understanding the propitious moment when this voice emerges, showing how —­ along with the exhilaration it provokes —­ the voice carries with it the history of strug­gles, the real­ity of duress, and the relative triumph of endurance. Pure pop is not readily associated with thought, although female stars often evoke feelings precisely b ­ ecause they only come to being as creatures of thought. Usually propped up on spurious grounds that have ­little to do with their own conception of self (sometimes when they are too young to have one to begin with), they have to truly fight to the death in order to arrive at in­de­pen­dence of concept —­ to formulate an alternative to heteropatriarchal ideas of what their art should be about and the form it should take. Other­wise they are simply mowed down, spit out by the machine when capital is done with them. If, on top of that, a singer becomes aligned with the arkhé, the expression of thought in voice reaches beyond the recording, concert hall, or tv screen into the very psychic structure of a collective. This I demonstrate by taking Lucecita Benítez (b. 1942) seriously as a musician. Identified with left-­leaning politics, the artist’s residence ­there and elsewhere was never entirely comfortable. Lucecita traversed successive stages when she changed personas very swiftly, ­going from being a youth star in the 1960s to her three iconic incarnations: the auteur of the late 1960s, the artiste of the early 1970s, and the diva of the 1980s. I examine ­these in turn. In ­music, you have to play the cards y­ ou’re dealt. W ­ omen artists know this from the get-go. Their lives as working musicians are complicated. Aside from all the ­labor that most musicians face, the years of debt if not poverty, the long hours playing and recording (often for a pittance), w ­ omen singers must confront their intense symbolization, one whose decisive ele­ments they have a tiny or no hand in shaping. The w ­ omen portrayed h ­ ere are remarkable for their intellect, iconic significance, and influence. All expressed ambivalence about the pedagogical imperative to represent what national m ­ usic 14 Introduction

should: respectability, accomplishment, values, and triumph. In one way or another, all expressed, directly or subliminally, the philosophical protestation, “I am nothing.” All have been subjected to an oblivion that, up to this day, remains as profoundly puzzling as it is disturbing, rendering them as the “nothing” in pop. As in the Festival Casals ad, where the machinery of advertising evacuated the body of the world-­famous cellist, absented any hint of the act of per­for­ mance or any visual trace of listening to per­for­mance, and stated that the inclusion of Casals playing the instrument would be equivalent to a “visual bromide,” the nothing is the center of this book, its key.19 My approach to the nothing, though, proceeds to dif­fer­ent ends from that of the ad, resolutely away from Latin Amer­i­ca as paradise and Latin Americans as natu­ral-­born performers for someone e­ lse’s plea­sure and profit. I do not expel the visual from my archive. I do not make claims for the sonorous over the visual. I place them side by side as part objects, ele­ments of a sensorium, while centering the sounded voice. I listen “distractedly.” Not confined to the nation-­state, or any regional understanding of the musical phenomenon, the inquiry that follows hopes to approximate what Lauren Berlant wrote of the “case”: “When it ­doesn’t work to change the conditions of exemplarity or explanation, something is deemed merely a case study, remanded to banal particularity. When it does, a personal or collective sensorium shifts.”20

I Am Nothing  15

ONE

GETTING OFF . . . ​THE NATION In a 1973 interview, the mercurial Puerto Rican singer, entertainer, and entrepreneur Myrta Silva stated, “I’m a winner. I only failed at the beginning of my ­career . . . ​ever since I became a public figure, I have never once failed.”1 Despite the singer’s confident declaration, Silva was well aware of the entanglement between “figure” and “failure.” She learned that failure was always around the corner when she set foot in New York City as a barely teenaged immigrant, circa 1938.2 She emigrated, she said, to become an artist. Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1923, Silva lived in poverty in the big city along with thousands of Puerto Rican and Latino immigrants, working an average of twenty-­five revue shows a week as a means of support and a way to initiate her ­music ­career. In a milieu Ruth Glasser lucidly describes as dominated by U.S. recording companies and their demand for “ethnic m ­ usic,” Silva advertised her talent to rca Victor as a guaracha singer.3 She staked her claim on her special affinity with the genre by describing herself as matching the genre’s temperament in personality terms: “On my own initiative, I went to the rca Victor offices, and asked to speak to the head of the Latin department, making it clear that if he did not see me they would lose out on the best guaracha singer t­ here was, of this new Latin American genre.”4 Approximately three de­cades ­after Silva’s daring stunt, in 1966, tv Radio Mirror would run a bilingual spread on Silva, “The Fat Golden One/La Gorda de Oro.” In 1939, a young lady walked into radio station ward in Brooklyn, said she was a ­great star and so impressed ­people that she was put to work singing and ­doing commercials. ­After her first show, for which she was paid one dollar, she sent herself one hundred fan letters. The young lady was Myrta Silva and she was thirteen years old. ­Today, Myrta ­doesn’t have to send any fan letters to herself, since she has one

of the most devoted audiences in tele­vi­sion. Myrta’s show, An Hour with You, is aired live over Newark’s wnju-­t v, the New York metropolitan area’s first commercial uhf tele­vi­sion. And that hour —­ Monday eve­ ning from 9 to 10 —­ is seen by over 90 per cent of the area’s Spanish-­ speaking viewers.5 In 1967, Silva was awarded the tv Radio Mirror prize for producing tv’s Top Variety Show in New York, and wnju-­t v received the award for Outstanding Programming in the Broadcasting Arts, for The Myrta Silva Show. Silva had become a beloved representative of the Puerto Rican community in New York of the 1960s. While hers was a Spanish-­language show, the prize was for all New York–­area tele­vi­sion, not just Latino tv. Puerto Rican newspapers ran the news, citing the magazine’s circulation of six million and the prize’s standing as the oldest such prize at the time in the U.S. radio and tv industry. Silva is quoted as saying, I accept this prize in the name of all us hispanos who live in New York City, so that it may serve as an incentive, so that you can see that your sacrifices and strug­gles have not been in vain. I am humbly grateful, ­because, above all ­things, this prize equals the recognition of Puerto Rican talent wherever we may find ourselves. Personally, I can say this is the greatest prize I have received in my twenty-­seven years in show business. Most significant is the fact that this prize has been awarded to me in this city of New York, the greatest city on earth, and where I started my ­career ­going hungry and earning a miserable salary of fifteen dollars a month.6 From the beginning of her ­career, she had cared about Latinos in the city. She had been one of them. Silva debuted at the Atlantic Theater in Brooklyn in 1939, became a regular in New York venues like the Teatro Hispano, Teatro Puerto Rico, and Car­ne­gie Hall, and kept a residence so she could maintain New York as the home base of her artistic operations. Among her many leadership actions in her crowning, 1960s years, she joined a protest against Playboy magazine for r­ unning a spread offensive to Cuban w ­ omen and led a protest against Ed S­ ullivan in 1968 for derisive remarks about Puerto Rican ­women in one of his tv broadcasts.7 While she triumphed in New York City, and pioneered Latino tele­vi­sion in the United States, her beloved Puerto Rico had become viciously split about its biggest star. Viewers ­were quick to question her national allegiances and Getting Off . . . the Nation  17

harbored an uncomfortable-­to-­repulsed attitude ­toward her unmarried, yet sexual status. Silva’s declaration of her greatest love —­ for her m ­ other, Mamá Yeya —­ surfaced on occasion as palliative: “Es lesbiana, pero buena hija” [She’s a lesbian, true, but she’s a good ­daughter]. Other viewers simply went into panic mode, ordering their ­children to “turn off the tv; we d ­ on’t watch that dyke in our ­house.” The epithet of the Fat Golden One encapsulates the quandary of simultaneous hatred and adoration: Being called fat in Puerto Rico was completely insulting, and certainly desexualizing, but the adjectival phrase “de oro” conveyed feelings of appreciation and a statement about sterling character. Even t­oday, ­music critics and journalists use this soubriquet that Silva resented, in addition to the infantilizing diminutive gordita or nuestra gordita. Beyond ­these problematic appropriations and rejections, perusing ­music history books yields the conclusion that Silva, arguably the single most successful Puerto Rican twentieth-­century pop star, appears as a footnote to a history narrated around male figures, a history written in lockstep with national-­popu­lar teleologies of cultural identity and pro­gress. Figures like Silva have merited only a few lines or, at best, cursory mentions in brief articles devoted to ­women artists or composers. How can this narrative be written other­wise? What did Silva crystallize as an artist, and how did it happen? What are the stakes of this ­career and why has its illustriousness been all but forgotten? This chapter steps back in time to provide an archive-­based genealogy to contextualize this shocking oblivion —­ an account based on m ­ usic culture, not patriarchal and heteronormative fantasies. Silva had a developed and conceptual understanding of her voice. At her most memorable, she used this vehicle against enforced strictures of sexual and gender be­hav­ior, targeting dominant bourgeois morality. She was never malleable and saleable. Silva believed completely in her artistic, individual, and social autonomy while refusing to be expelled from belonging and her right to have opinions, no m ­ atter how unpop­u­lar. Silva’s triumph despite gender strictures (including her accomplishments in the business arena of the ­music industry) made the establishment very uncomfortable indeed. This discomfort was displaced onto insidious characterizations of her personality and artistic temperament. The few authoritative accounts of Myrta Silva’s c­ areer have contributed to naturalize the dominant culture’s construction of Silva. This gendered writing hampers Puerto Rican ­music criticism more generally and becomes onerous in the case of Latin American w ­ omen artists of the twentieth ­century, who have received scant critical attention but many sexist interpretations. 18  Chapter 1

Concretely, Silva was accepted into the guaracha and marginalized in the bolero. Incredibly, as a songwriter of intimate, reflective m ­ usic, Silva was constantly u ­ nder suspicion as a fake or, worse, a thief. She responded by consciously playing with an equivocation not of her making, namely, the inappropriate relationship the public established between her person and her persona, on the one hand, and m ­ usic critics between her comedic singing and her bolero songwriting. From the start, she worked in two parallel voices. One was the party, ethnic, singing voice of guaracha (where Silva’s own contributions ­were often erased in ­legal credits) and the other the Pan-­Americanist, universalist voice of the bolero (a songwriting voice recognized legally but from which Silva was discouraged as a singer). As an individual, Silva was certainly stung by the public reduction of her musicianship and musicality. Addressing negative comments about her vocal instrument de­cades ­after her first hits, Silva retorted, “I’ve done pretty well with my lousy voice.” Referencing her desire to sing the famous bolero “Júrame” by the acclaimed Mexican songwriter María Grever, she quoted a conversation between the two. Silva reportedly told Grever, “Since I d ­ on’t have much of a voice, I ­can’t sing some of your songs,” to which Grever responded, “You have what it takes to sing my songs, and that is heart, not a ­great voice.”8 Throughout her ­career, Silva called attention to voice as an entity that did not have to be only or primarily musically virtuosic in order to command an audience and own a song. Instead, she put into play a virtuosity that José Esteban Muñoz has linked to queer artistry: the brilliant, conceptual staging of negativity and failure.9 During her first de­cade of work, Silva developed a rich musical repertoire, covering guaracha, rumba, son, and bolero. She cut her chops as a percussionist and bandleader. She worked ­under contract to Victor on hundreds of recordings from 1938 to 1948. She l­ater jokingly referred to her identity in most of them as “Vocal Refrain,” indicating an unrecorded history of musical l­ abor.10 In the 1930s, she recorded several 78s with local bands in New York City ­until she met Rafael Hernández and he signed her to perform with his group, Cuarteto Victoria, in 1939. The standard tale is that Hernández “discovered” Silva, thus birthing her musical ­career.11 The discovery narrative, a common trope in the writing of w ­ omen’s artistic ­careers, might unwittingly obscure Silva’s initiative, ambition, talent, and musical ­labor prior to getting her first big break. It was Silva’s parody of “Ahora seremos felices” (We ­shall be happy, at long last), her very first rca recording (with the Julio Roqué Orchestra), that drew Hernández’s attention. Upon meeting him at a Roqué Getting Off . . . the Nation  19

dinner party, Silva told him on the spot that his m ­ usic for “Ahora seremos felices” was “a piece of crap” and that he should be thankful that she had written new lyr­ics. (The adult Silva spoke of her parodic lyr­ics as “abominable” and expressed regret at having “assassinated” Hernández’s song, an action she ascribed to her youth. Yet the parody works brilliantly.) Hernández knew he had found a musical gem. He hired her as Cuarteto Victoria’s female lead on a tour to Puerto Rico and Colombia, single-­handedly raising the group’s profile exponentially throughout the Amer­i­cas. Even at such a young age, Silva had a canny understanding of what makes a m ­ usic per­for­mance work and was an innate talent scout (for example, she discovered Bobby Capó singing in Old San Juan, and it was at her bidding that he became male lead for Victoria for a brief stint, launching his own, illustrious ­career in Latino pop). Hernández met Silva as an impossibly young female mi­grant who had become an artist against all odds. Silva earned ten dollars a rec­ord with rca and five dollars a show with the Cuarteto Victoria. The older Silva vividly recalled ­these years: I’m an artist thanks to God’s gift to me, namely, my stage presence, which I learned by working in theater. At age thirteen I became a presenter without ever having done it, simply ­because dire need forced me to. I was asked: do you know how to host a show? And I said: Are you kidding? I’m the best! But, have you hosted a show? I’m telling you, since I was born! In truth, I had never set foot on a stage. But I did then, and I was hired, and I spent three months as the mc of a show in the Teatro Hispano, on 116 and Fifth Ave­nue, yes, in the place where ­children ­were skinned alive. I was a child, and I survived; I’m still alive.12 The gritty, hypersexual, and harsh delivery that l­ ater listeners reflexively came to associate with Myrta Silva’s personality grew out of an intersection between her naturally subversive temperament and the spaces she first worked in, where sentimentality and romanticism ­were completely out of place. Even at thirteen years old, Silva understood how critical persona was to success. She read the guaracha as framing especially well in the context of the rising recording industry, with its hunger for an ethnic Latino market along with dominant, predatory male fantasies of the ­woman singer. Silva had gained fame by the time she began recording ­under sole billing around 1942. For de­cades, she maintained a unique and ultimately successful focus on building a ­whole enterprise aimed at financial and artistic 20  Chapter 1

in­de­pen­dence. She achieved artistic in­de­pen­dence in a few short years. rca Victor paid tribute to Silva in Buenos Aires in 1950 as their best-­selling artist for the Latino/Latin American market in 1947, 1948, and 1949. Financially speaking, however, t­ hings had been quite difficult throughout the 1940s, despite her fame. It was a time when the m ­ usic industry extracted profit from underpaid artists and songwriters pretty much at its ­will. Most specialists regard the 1940s as Silva’s finest musically. She recorded dozens of 78 rec­ords during this time and had her greatest hits. When Silva started adding her cunning improvisations to song lyr­ics, her contributions to lewd songs went beyond simply acting the part of the Lolita that had been the basis of her early hits. As the 1940s wore on, she wrote elaborate recitative segments and provided song sketches to Cuban composers, most notably Ñico Saquito (Antonio Fernández). The child sex object figuration gave way to a fully developed, autonomous creation with no easy categorization, defying concepts of authorship confined to the ­legal songwriter. In 1943 Silva became the first w ­ oman timbalera certified by the American Federation of ­Music, quite an achievement. She was a self-­taught musician que tenía la clave (could follow the beat, usually 3/2). Silva’s percussive approach to voice, particularly in her interpretations of guarachas, constitutes a breakthrough for female singing. She was an extraordinary sonera and, adding to her innate musical ear, understood the conceptual density of cadence (known by its vari­ous vernacular names, such as el tumbaíto and mi cantao). Playing the timbales, soneando, and bandleading: ­These musical capabilities inched her ­toward the masculine position in pop (and let’s not forget that this was, decidedly, a man’s world). Except for the occasional all-­girl band, Silva’s positioning was simply unheard of. Her genius lay in her uncanny and differently gendered ability to connect with the audience beyond passing entertainment value. She describes it as a capacity for improv: “I’ve always worked without a script. I am only g­ reat if the audience is. If the audience i­sn’t into it, neither am I. . . . ​As we say in musical jargon, I work ad lib. The band ­can’t keep time when I work, it ­can’t bend me to its ­will, ­because I work ad lib.”13 When Silva moved back to her native Puerto Rico around 1950, she achieved her goal of financial in­de­pen­dence, becoming an influential and famous producer, tv host, and media personality. What is less known is that she helped scores of artists in their ­careers. She unfailingly supported new talent and featured all kinds of m ­ usic and musicians in her show, from pop stars Olga Guillot, Eartha Kitt, and La Lupe to classical pianists Liberace and Jesús María Sanromá. Silva’s musical breadth is simply remarkable. If to this we add her Getting Off . . . the Nation  21

figure 1.1 ​­Album cover, Myrta Silva, Por el norte y por el sur: Recordando el pasado (Remembering the past), Extra Rec­ords ll13, 1960s?. Compilation of earlier hits. Silva is about sixteen years old in this picture.

genius for the comedic in m ­ usic per­for­mance, which she developed beyond ­music per­for­mance into tele­vi­sion and print journalism, expanding the reach of her voice, a picture emerges of a figure far past her analytical due in Latin American and Latino pop and gender studies of ­music and ethnicity. Silva was always regarded as “all body,” and her singing coded along this presumptive excess. Initially the Lolita figure, she became the worldly sexual bombshell, and eventually and unwillingly morphed into the disgusting object, bodily signified through the culture’s scandalous reaction to an overweight ­woman past her thirties who continued to be sexually explicit and out­spoken. Figure 1.1 is an a­ lbum cover featuring a very early, undated publicity photo­graph of Silva. Silva sports the tools of her trade, the maracas, and stands in front of a prop (what appears to be a fake conga). Obviously, both instruments immediately call forth consumption-­driven latinidad, a spectacle of ethnic identity. Silva is the image of party, excess, and fun, a visual portrayal amplified by the inclusion of percussive instruments. The conga appears as 22  Chapter 1

figure 1.2 ​Myrta Silva with the Cuarteto Victoria, circa 1935. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Puerto Rico.

a phallic visual prop, not an instrument she played competently; a flimsy-­ looking column (a frequent item in con­temporary portraits of ­women singers) visually underscores the patriarchal framing. Silva was an expert maraca player, but the photographer prob­ably had in mind the parallel between the maracas and breasts, a common sexual pun in the con­temporary imaginary to this day. The maracas join dance m ­ usic, Silva’s body, and Silva’s given name to sex and good times. Her name is scribbled on the side of the conga drum, taking on a life of its own in­de­pen­dently of how Silva’s body is framed, decisively aligning Myrta Silva with percussion in a conceptual, musical manner. Although her voice’s incorrigibility is inseparable from Silva’s success since her earliest artistic work, it’s de-­emphasized in this shot. Silva’s mouth is closed as she grins.14 Figure  1.2 is a portrait with the Cuarteto Victoria, slightly ­later than the publicity still in figure 1.1. This is one of several portraits that reflect the nascent Pan-­Latino aesthetic dominating the ­music industry in New York in the 1930s and its repre­sen­ta­tion of race as well as gender. Silva occupies the Getting Off . . . the Nation  23

central position in the group of men. She is starting to resemble the mature artist but has not quite arrived at her visual autonomy. The wide grin and her bold, cross-­legged stance w ­ ere considered uncouth and unfeminine in photo­ graphs of Latin ­women singers. The maracas now sit right atop Silva’s pubic area, reinforcing puerile puns about percussive instruments and w ­ omen’s bodies. Silva is dressed a la guarachera, representing the group’s ethnic appeal through rising Latino genres.15 The men are nattily dressed in suits and photographed without their instruments. In other portraits, they are seen with rumbero attire as part of their stage personas. The Victoria men w ­ ere unable to separate themselves completely from racial and ethnic spectacle, but ­were not dependent on this costume or this persona more generally for success, and they ­were not associated with this iconography in the larger sense of discourse, as happened with Silva. The musicians ­adopted Silva for contrast at more than one level. The group created a repertoire that played a pivotal role in shaping the ethnic Latino pop canon in the early twentieth ­century. Victoria built a dual repertoire, appealing to feelings of nationality and nostalgia that presented as pure and moral, on the one hand, while delighting audiences with another set of obscene songs with the w ­ oman singer as punctum, much like Silva in this photo, on the other. Beyond the superficial repre­sen­ta­tion of the female body for merry consumption, Victoria capitalized on Silva’s brilliant, thoroughly musical manipulation of the “other side” of codes of decent belonging. A series of visual cues indicates the moment when live per­for­mance joined the two repertoires onstage. Silva holds her instrument; si­mul­ta­neously, the men exist as subjects above the materiality of instruments and the body, in a more abstract connection to ­music and culture. They hover over the ­woman lead singer in a vague gesture of owner­ship, while she is charged with materializing the ethnic sound. Race is displaced onto Silva and away from the men. Stating the obvious, Silva was white skinned and the Cuarteto Victoria members w ­ ere Afro–­Puerto Rican. Just as with the guaracha’s ambivalent racial character, the picture deposits unresolved meanings and strug­gles in her sexualized body, signified by her own body as well by as other signs, including the maracas, the folkloric, Afro-­Cuban dress, and Silva’s head­scarf (derived from the teatro bufo and its mulata type). Like the cabareteras of famous Mexican movies of the 1940s and especially 1950s, Silva as artist, more generally speaking, recalls the culture’s ambivalence ­toward its racial identity.16 Its championing of its musical trove of genres during this period, many Afro-­Caribbean, did not address antiblack 24  Chapter 1

figure 1.3 ​Myrta Silva performing “Nada” on the Banco Popu­lar special in tribute to an ailing Rafael Hernández, 1965. She is seen leading the band.

racism, much as the emergence of wildly pop­u­lar ­women artists d ­ idn’t resolve the sexism of the ­music industry. Figure 1.3 portrays Silva at the pinnacle of her ­career in tele­vi­sion in the mid1960s, more than two de­cades ­later. This footage of a live per­for­mance shows her performing her signature song, “Nada” (Nothing), in a tv special dedicated to an ailing Rafael Hernández in 1965.17 To unbiased eyes, juxtaposing the young and the m ­ iddle-­aged Silva may simply evoke the passing of time. The first two photo­graphs portray a precocious youngster; the third is the same ­woman years ­later, well into a hugely successful ­career. To ­music-­oriented eyes, the older Silva occupies a dif­fer­ent musical position from the two early stills. Silva leads the band. She has musical authority. The microphone underscores her act of singing, making her voice indexically pres­ent and central as she fronts the full orchestra. Yet to the sexist and homophobic eyes of dominant culture, Silva’s looks and actions in the third photo ranged from unsettling to unacceptable. This, despite Silva’s elegant clothes and plenty of bling, indicating her passage from working to upper-­middle class and from working singer to multifaceted musical force. From being the sexualized adolescent figure of the late 1930s to the sexual bombshell of the 1940s, Silva turned into a desexualized figure upon which the public imposed its narrative: a loss of sexual appeal; a tragic love story to account for further disinterest in worldly pleasures; Getting Off . . . the Nation  25

and unspecified episodes of a derailed life. Yet Silva was not a victim of alcoholism or any substance abuse. She was firmly in control of her business. She evoked paroxysms of adoration and glee, evinced by the literally hundreds of photo­graphs of, and extensive print articles about, Silva across the Amer­i­cas. And she had, by all accounts of her personal friends, a very satisfactory personal life, including life partners.18

THE ABUNDANCE OF LACK When ­music critics silence Silva by desexualizing her, they appeal to a simplistic definition of lack: Silva lost the capacity for sexuality and never got it back, thus her voice deteriorated and she turned to a pathetic existence as a bolero songwriter, in contrast to her glorious years as a guaracha singer. Silva wrote some of the quin­tes­sen­tial boleros of the Latin Americanist repertoire, and her contribution should not be minimized. However, it is true that her genius at guaracha remains unparalleled; one could argue she is peerless. In the normative account, this guaracha success follows from her identity as sexual bombshell or prototypical nymphet of heteronormative fantasy. This is a notably shallow way to render Silva’s per­for­mance of the obscene, hallmark of the guaracha. ­There may be a po­liti­cal move in obscuring the conceptual depth Silva gained with per­for­mance experience and as her fame and influence increased. She is still read as merely vulgar (in the sense of tasteless and low), yet her musical creation cannot be adequately described and theorized with this adjective. Silva’s work must be understood historically as a carefully crafted, unique musical statement, whose treatment has ranged from taming to censoring, mirroring the ­battle with censorship she fought in her own ­career. Silva’s early repertoire almost exclusively featured songs with serial puns and double entendres taking full advantage of her nymphet status. For example, “Déjamelo ver” (Let me see it, 1939) posits the speaker’s desires as polymorphously perverse, not Oedipally or­ga­nized: “The other day, in La Marqueta / without wanting to / I noticed a pair of pretty eyes / that a ­woman sported.”19 Silva sings of selling her wares to the highest bidder in “La bombonera” (The candywoman, 1940): “I am the candywoman from San Juan / my candy is unlike any other ­you’ve tasted.” In “Mami” (Mommy, 1941) she is the hysteric: “Mommy, mommy, mommy, it’s so bad to be pretty, I feel a desire to not be what I am / Mommy, mommy, mommy, I feel so strange, I ­don’t know what’s gotten over me / Mommy, mommy, mommy, ­these dizzy spells are driving me crazy.” She offers to be men’s sexual guide in “Por el norte y 26  Chapter 1

por el sur” (North by south, 1941). In all of ­these examples, Silva stood for the oversexed girl of heteronormative male fantasy. Silva was quite young when she recorded the sexually explicit song “Mis tres novios” (My three boyfriends) with the Cuarteto Victoria in 1940. (She rerecorded it ­later in her ­career, in a version t­ oday’s fans can listen to via Spotify. The newer a­ lbum artwork is not to be missed, featuring a brown-­skinned “homeboy” figure and two white-­skinned male figures, one tossing a dress jacket over his shoulder and the other one proffering a glass of champagne.) Silva’s original per­for­mance of “Mis tres novios” brilliantly re-­created the deceptive nature of romantic and sexual talk. Silva amplified the fantasy of the lyr­ics with her chunks in parlando, which I render ­here in italics: Qué novios más chulos tengo Me dan gusto, demasiado Y solo porque los tengo Locos con este cantao Y yo le digo, papito, tú sabes que te quiero, te toco el clarinete, la trompeta, el saxofón, lo que tú quieras te lo toco, te poso boca arriba, boca abajo, de perfil, como tú quieras me retrato mi papi, ay I have such nice boyfriends They ­really please me, maybe too much It’s prob­ably ­because I drive them Crazy with my tune And I tell them, ­Daddy, you know I love you, I’ll play [touch] your clarinet, your trumpet, your saxophone, I’ll play [touch] what­ever you want, I’ll strike a pose, face down, face up, in profile, sideways, whichever way you want I’ll spread my legs for you, oh yeah Silva is backed by a small conjunto (ensemble), with horns, guitars, and a conga drum, and is prob­ably playing the maracas in the recording. She affects innocence by cooing and babbling so words are blurred or lost, progressively substituting semantics for the materiality of sound. The sonic ele­ments of Silva’s voice, her modulations, choice of words, incorporation of spoken word, and sonic engagement of a complicit listener cannot be captured by the written lyr­ics or the song’s sheet m ­ usic, only by listening to the recording. One can imagine what a ruckus she must have stirred live. The young Silva played the male fantasy to perfection, cleverly performing traditional signs of female vulnerability and enticement: ­little girl voice, giggle, and ner­vous flounce. Getting Off . . . the Nation  27

Silva did not write any of the double entendre songs she initially became famous for. In a posthumous tribute to Rafael Hernández in the 1970s, a de­ cade or so before she herself died, Silva was dead serious when she stated, “The first time I sang songs with double entendre it was b ­ ecause Rafael wrote 20 them for me. I swear.” Instead of remembering Silva as a bombshell who lost her sex appeal, we should remember her sonic licentiousness, the way she was the first Latino star to transform the culturally inflicted passive position of the ­woman into a putative bottom power. In the same manner Silva spoke of herself as being dominant on stage, “Mis tres novios” speaks of a ­woman who is playing at submissiveness but is r­ eally the top, as do “Por el norte y por el sur” and many other humorous songs enacting male fantasies. The cantao —­ defined by tempo, rhythm, mea­sure, intonation, modulation, and tone —­ became Silva’s preferred way of tackling the heteronormativity and outright sexism of the songs. The cantao made her the top. Silva’s work began in the age of the circus, with its recourse to freakishness and outlandishness and its peculiar, cruel sense of humor. The song “Mis tres novios,” in Silva’s voice, prob­ably this very recording, was a staple of the circus tour.21 We should keep in mind that her voice at this point and ­until the advent of tele­vi­sion was primarily an acousmatic voice, with the overtones of incantation and dominance that ensue when the source of the voice cannot be located or visually figured (as Michel Chion famously discussed in The Voice in Cinema). Silva was surely acquainted with vaudev­ille and burlesque and incorporated comedy theater’s signature gestures and overall attitude when performing live. The circus, cabaret, vaudev­ille, and revue produced their own brands of normality and the acceptable in their enclosed realms; Silva adapted ­these formulations to the mass forms of Latino radio, recording, and, ­later, tele­vi­sion. The first manifestation of the Silva voice, imprinted on the groove and heard over radio, recorded and live, respectively, set the tone for Silva’s reception over de­cades. This first voice imbued Silva with an acousmatic presence that at once fascinated and unnerved the listener. She emerges as our first example of a thinking voice, given the encounter between natu­ral talent, skillful deployment of shifting codes governing performing female bodies, and the larger-­context game changer of the ascent of the ­music industry in unequal hemispheric development. Through spoken singing or parlando, which emphasized this acousmatic quality by dissolving nearness and distance, Silva consistently played with the boundary between speech and singing to mine the illusory intimacy of

28  Chapter 1

persona.22 This aided her in developing the stage creation much more than the average artist in Latino early pop, toying with the sexist imposition that assumed the coincidence of her person with the content of her repertoire. Her earliest per­for­mances utilized the scopic regime of necessity to satisfy ­simple, heteronormative male fantasies. But it was Silva’s proj­ect to anchor the per­for­mance vocally, rebutting the scopic regime’s primacy in musical listening to w ­ omen and insisting on her rightful place as a singer and musician. It is no accident that her early repertoire, written by men, would revolve around fantasies where the ­woman as doll merely ventriloquizes heteronormative, male desire. Such fantasies depended on the scopic and its illusion of desire’s mastery, a hand Silva expertly dealt. In what follows, I trace how Silva went beyond and intuited the symbolic quality of voice —­ its capacity to re­ arrange signifiers and therefore desire —­ and how she implemented this insight through her percussive per­for­mance. It would be foolhardy to simply recur to a normative, feminist account of Silva as a successfully resistant subject b ­ ecause she wielded voice’s symbolic capacities. While she emerged as a winner, Silva paid a price, one that I ­will delineate by reconstructing the trajectory of the original signifier/persona of Myrta across the de­cades in parallel with an eerie double, known by the signifier/persona of Chencha. Myrta and Chencha emerged from Silva’s successful yet financially precarious 1940s c­ areer. Myrta was her artistic persona from the beginning. Chencha developed more slowly. Both personas established a relationship to truth as it is posited in lyr­ics. Silva exploited lyr­ics, exposing their fixity in legalese as a fiction and cleverly playing off their notated existence to gesture ­toward the improvisatory and spoken, which lay outside of ­legal authorship, in the resonance of a song as it is performed (following Jean-Luc Nancy’s remarks on resonance: “Resonance is at once that of a body that is sonorous for itself and resonance of sonority in a listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens”).23 Signifiers and speech are inextricably linked. Speech is likewise inextricable from notions of voice as interiority or conscience, which have very deep roots in Western philosophy and influence our understanding of singers, particularly of ­women who have been taken to be too close to their speech, less desiring or perhaps less capable of acquiring a distance from their artistic creations. Most listeners knew Silva’s rec­ords, not her live per­for­mance, but they w ­ ere able to share in her performative speech b ­ ecause she so extraordinarily imprinted liveness and the inside/outside symbolic quality of voice into her

Getting Off . . . the Nation  29

recordings.24 Parlando became a virtuosic per­for­mance of negativity, fitting in well with Muñoz’s suggestion of queer virtuosity as a perspicacious staging of presumptive artistic failure. Myrta and Chencha became akin to Lacanian quilting points in the artist’s own discourse and acquired an uncanny power or hold on the shared psychic space between performer and audience.25 This quilting subjectified the artist in ways we may theorize from a careful analy­ sis of her body of work, filling in her critical biography as production (that is, inserted in an entire po­liti­cal economy that depended on the symbolic and specifically on w ­ omen’s role in this symbolic domain) and teasing out the cultural import of Silva’s subjectification as part of a larger discourse on ­women and ­music and not simply a product of her temperament, talent, or pathology.

SIGNATURE SONG Upon recording “Nada” (Nothing) in New York City in 1942, Silva moved away decisively from the purely playful nature of her songs. “Nada” became her lifelong signature song. While Rafael Hernández has songwriting credits, the song does not make any sense without the phenomenological force that was Myrta Silva. Even if Silva did not directly pen the song, “Nada” reflects Silva’s intentions as she began to inhabit the space of the figure: an artist whose meaning was born in ­music but who exceeded ­music’s domain to become historically significant as a cultural phenomenon. This projection distinguishes Silva from other artists who worked with double entendre and the obscene. “Nada,” in spoken Spanish, is a colloquial interjection, similar to the En­ glish phrase. It can mean “I’m ready to wrap this up” as much as “I ­don’t know how to wrap this up.” It can be a conclusion to a series of statements, indicating completion, or an ac­know­ledg­ment that resolution or completion is not pos­si­ble. In this latter sense, it inevitably indicates a linguistic postponement of that which speech is trying to grasp. It alludes to the dialogic but not to a balanced state in which dialogue is reconciled. It is not antagonistic, necessarily, ­either. It is a point of suspension. Just as in “My Three Boyfriends,” in “Nada” Silva employs the plaintive girl-­ next-­door voice, with its petulant tone and hints of babbling and cooing in the refrain. This aspect is in sync with her 1930s repertoire. Th ­ ere is, however, an impor­tant difference between ­these repertoires. Silva resignifies her persona, bringing it ­under her own purview and wresting it definitely away from her extramusical existence: 30  Chapter 1

Nada, no quiero que me miren No quiero que me digan, que me toquen, que me hablen, que me ­inviten a cantar Nada, ya no me llamo Myrta Así es que ya lo saben, que mi nombre ya no existe ni por tierra ni por mar Nothing, I do not want to be looked at, I ­don’t want to be told what to do, be touched, spoken to, or be invited to sing Nothing, I ­will no longer be called Myrta So now you know that my name ­doesn’t exist, not by land, not by sea On the surface, Silva sings about a ­woman with an ill temper and foul character who wants a divorce. Taking the work of signifiers into account changes the song’s meaning completely, however. “My name does not exist” is the equivalent to saying, “My name from this moment on is a signifier.” Silva’s classic singing of the refrain —­ “ay cara cara carambita, ay cara cara carambamba, esta rumba ya me trae loquita, esta rumba ya me trae cansá” —­ is the song’s sonic key.26 The syllables are nonsensically arranged, representing rhythm, and the words also indicate cadence (esta rumba) and its physical effects (it’s driving me crazy, I’m totally fed up with the rumba). “Rumba” also alludes to “the tales about my life.” Silva decisively articulated a dif­fer­ent entity from the fantasy figure of her first two or three star years. This persona proposed an ethical positioning in the face of life, including ­music; it proposed a cynical position, targeting collective listening.27 Silva’s per­for­mance of “Nada” is a direct response to her subjectification in the ­music industry. “Nada” does more than play up a ste­reo­type: It inaugurates the period when Silva yoked listeners’ laughter to the affect of disgust, making ­music an “acoustic mirror” and Silva a “speaking body.” The acoustic mirror is Kaja Silverman’s classic term for the female voice in cinema, which, Silverman found, exhibited a lack of synchronicity with the paternal gaze that classic Hollywood film fed upon, despite being, on the surface, completely at its scopic mercy. The first Silva operated along the lines of the acoustic mirror, escaping the scopic law through a parodic, vocal ventriloquizing. The speaking body is Shoshana Felman’s classic treatment of the body that erupts upon the sure­fire use of the performative utterance, linguistically birthing a simultaneous body of scandal and seduction, neatly describing Silva’s emergence in the 1940s as a sonic tour de force.28 Getting Off . . . the Nation  31

For Felman, Don Juan is the epitome of the speaking body. The felicity or in­ felicity of utterances is the goal and not their falsity or truth. When I think of the Don Juan situation as a linguistic seduction, happening through speech and sound, I recall Silva’s sleight of hand with lyr­ics and the illusion of speech in her per­for­mance. I also cannot help but recall a c­ ouple of anecdotes I heard in Havana about Silva’s seductive power. ­These recollections correspond in time to Silva’s first Cuban visits and the 1942 recording of “Nada.” One ­woman artist, Silva’s con­temporary, described Silva as “muy declarada” [completely out] and recounted how she “wooed w ­ omen right t­here, in the cmq cafeteria.”29 The artist did not want to be identified; she made it clear that any association with Silva entailed an automatic association with lesbianism and, therefore, disgust. An interview with Manuel Villar of the Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión circles around Silva’s sexual exploits in Havana. Villar said that speaking of Myrta Silva’s love life was like speaking of Chano Pozo’s.30 He did not explain exactly what he meant by the comparison, but made it clear that the association with Pozo conveyed trou­ble and vio­lence, linking Silva with inassimilable and genius figures —­ the “Saint Genets” of pop ­music.31 René Espí, the son of Roberto Espí of the legendary Conjunto Casino, told me of Silva’s bohemian escapades with his ­father. With a wide grin, he recalled his ­father boasting that he had had an affair with Silva. René wondered if his ­father was gleefully partaking in myth making b ­ ecause, as he said, “Yo sé que ella le descargaba a la otra onda” (I know she played with the other team).32 René’s anecdote suggested parallels between Espí’s macho and Silva’s butch seductiveness. As far as I could gauge the m ­ atter from memory scraps, always tricky to navigate, Silva’s queerness augmented the phantasmatic power of her per­for­ mance. She exerted a fascination that ensued from a combination of musical talent, masterly interaction with the audience, and the discursive mystery of her sexual life. The audience was in on the cultural joke, knew about it, a­ fter the psychoanalytic knowing that Sigmund Freud named disavowal: “I know that she is, but . . .” Ascertaining ­whether Silva was a Don Juan or simply just having fun living as a relatively emancipated young w ­ oman is not critical to the analy­sis of the acoustic mirror and speaking body she astutely employed. I mention the anecdotes insofar as they shed light on the construction of Silva as a bodily phenom of sex and voice. ­Later in life Silva boasted of having had “many loves” but deciding to remain “married to her ­career.” She also spoke for the first time about a miscarriage. She employed mythical terms to relate fatal losses to account for her unmarried life, including a lurid tale about a suicide attempt in New York. She alleged 32  Chapter 1

that she had always been “in love with love itself,” a very typical public allocution of queer ­women who did not wish to self-­disclose but cannot accurately be thought of as closeted. Silva kept her private life out of the public eye successfully, without having to sacrifice leading a full life or conditioning her artistic work to preconceptions of w ­ omen’s lives. To protect her privacy as well as her ­career, she had l­ittle choice but to resort to conventional discourse to elude reporters’ questions and the public fixation with the details of her personal life.33 Silva has been written into discourse as androgynous or desexualized, even in sympathetic quarters.34 A tame androgyny, one that does not unsettle or provoke, like the one that has sometimes been assigned to Silva, can be summarily dismissed. It is only slightly preferable to the more violent move of desexualization. Both characterizations ­either overlook or refuse to theorize Silva’s vocal play, her lyr­ics to listen to, which confront the listener with the socially disgusting in a precise and thorough way. Disgust is one of the “ugly feelings” Sianne Ngai brilliantly analyzes in her book Ugly Feelings. She writes, “­There is a sense in which [disgust] seeks to draw ­others into its exclusion of its object, enabling a strange kind of sociability.”35 Ngai’s approach provides another route to understanding the peculiar variant of seduction performed by the acoustic mirror and the speaking body. Silva consciously launched an attack against society’s inhibitions, prohibitions, and hypocrisies by thematizing and theorizing her own per­for­mance in her humorous repertoire through a complex negativity, therefore having, as it ­were, the last laugh: “Who’s disgusting now?” The inability to preserve a comfortable distance from the object (in “Nada,” the singing, performing ­woman and ­later, the Chencha character) came to define the success of any Myrta Silva per­for­mance. The inclusion of the proper noun “Myrta” in the song “Nada” could well have been Silva’s idea, breaching the distance between signifier and signified and between persona and person. Even if she did not directly collaborate on the lyr­ics, the song was written for her, and the signifier can only do its work due to Silva’s prior ­labor and act of self-­creation. The signifier “Myrta” gained in importance as the years went on, thanks to Silva’s musical intelligence and artistic development of negativity. “Nada” ’s title, “nothing,” is what Silva is offering her desiring audience onstage and in rec­ords, a negative of every­thing that the male fantasies of other songs ­were based on. Structurally, this negative occupies the same position as the fullness of the presumptively available ­woman. As mentioned at this chapter’s opening, Silva knew that the overlapping of failure and figure never ended, that an artist was a target b ­ ecause a good Getting Off . . . the Nation  33

artist put desire itself in circulation. The artist creates a peculiar, public intimacy or Lacanian “extimacy.” Mladen Dolar defines extimacy as “the simultaneous inclusion/exclusion, which retains the excluded at its core.”36 When in 1973 Silva said, “I’m a winner,” she suggested that as a c­ areer, ­music had been a dangerous game. She knew she had flirted with the danger of failure for de­cades and had always come out just on this side of winning. She also knew she had multiple ­battle scars. Silva was able to disrupt musical laws of meaningfulness with her percussive voice, especially ­those governing ­women’s normative per­for­mance. Past a certain point, more or less coinciding with “Nada,” this capacity to annihilate the machine of meaningfulness and replace it with “signifierness,” hovering on the very boundary, was regarded as increasingly threatening.37 Myrta and Chencha, Silva’s two personas, became “letters,” peculiar master signifiers related and unrelated to Silva.38 She was their producer and she performed the l­ abor to bring them about and maintain them. She extracted, eventually, profit from them. But since their significance depended as much on her as it did on larger social discourse, she could not control their displacement. Indeed, what happened to Silva is inseparable from gender discourse and the positioning of ­women in the social field as it is refracted in culture. Following Jacques Lacan in Seminar XX, Encore, ­women are charged with the burden of “signifierness,” precluded from exchange in the sexual relationship ­because they are the ones exchanged between men. Indeed, one way to interpret both “Mis tres novios” and “Nada” echoes Lacan’s playful, negative axiom: “­There is no such t­ hing as a sexual relationship.” Lacan goes beyond literal exchange between men to elucidate symbolic circulation between vari­ous subjectivities, of which the feminine in patriarchal socie­ties is a prototype. W ­ omen do bear the brunt of the letter as the vehicle of a par­tic­u­lar nothing, similar to the mathematical zero: “Nothing is something.” I pres­ent the reader with the first nothing of several in this book. The nothing, obviously, is the overwhelming signifier in Silva’s signature song. Upon recording “Nada,” Silva circulated from 1942 to 1972 as she traveled to perform live and through rec­ords and radio and tv broadcasts, never quite being able to shake off her public identification with that par­tic­u­lar song. Further, Silva’s voice in the halcyon de­cades of Latin ­music exhibited the letter’s displacement; hence through the nothing lies one way to theorize Silva’s extraordinary success as a vocal performer of this and similar genres in which soneo, percussion, and improv articulated her evolving ethics of per­for­mance. The weight of Silva’s con­temporary audience in completing the meaning of her musical persona and sustaining the displacement that solidified meaning 34  Chapter 1

can be gleaned in an extant live recording of “Por algo será” (Something in me, 1947), a brilliant example of Silva’s performative use of innuendo and spoken word, asides, jokes, laughter, and other vocal ele­ments such as sneering and moaning to create a mesmerizing and sexualized effect.39 It puts into play the two signifiers of Myrta and Chencha, similarly to multiple songs of Silva’s 1940s repertoire, and it deploys the signifier “nada” (nothing) as did other hits of the period, also broadcast live over the radio. Silva worked as the hugely pop­u­lar lead singer for La Sonora Matancera during 1949–1950; thanks to this stint, she was voted Best Foreign Artist of Cuba in 1950 (beating, as she proudly pointed out, the Mexicans María Félix, Los Panchos, and Jorge Negrete, all superstars).40 Silva recorded this song with the Sonora live in the studios of cmq Radio, and was the songwriter. Silva’s soneo is half-­sung, half-­spoken, in response to the refrain, por algo será (­there must be something in me): Será que yo tengo un truquito que nadie lo sabe, yo tengo un tumbaíto pa’ lavar la ropa La mojo y la seco, la seco y la mojo, la vuelvo a mojar, la vuelvo a secar Que tú me dices mami Que tú me dices mimi Que tú me dices mimita (por algo será) Aunque tú camines como Chencha, te quiero, mamita (por algo será) Nada, yo no soy más bonita que las otras, pero tampoco más fea . . . ​(ja, ja) Que tú me quieres . . . ​ Que tú me lloras . . . ​ Que tú me buscas . . . ​ It must be I have a trick up my sleeve. I have a ­little rhythm when it comes to washing clothes I dry them, I wet them, I wet them and dry them, I wet them again, I dry them again Something in me makes you want to call me mami Call me mimi Call me ­little mimi (­there must be something in me) [sneer] “Even if you walk like Chencha, I love you, darling” [with moan] ­There must be something in me Okay, so, nothing, I may not be prettier than the ­others, but I’m not any uglier, ­either [scoffs] Getting Off . . . the Nation  35

[Audience laughter] [Moaning] Something makes you want me . . . ​ Something makes you long for me . . . ​ Something makes you seek me out . . . ​[audience laughter] Silva quotes Cuban songs in her recitative and talks directly to the live audience pres­ent in the studio, seeking their complicity in the game. The audience is definitely giving her f­ ree rein, and she is able to be g­ reat, just as she explained when she said, “I work ad lib.” The recording re-­creates a double, simultaneous live audience: t­hose who w ­ ere pres­ent during the recording (preserved in the rec­ord grooves) and the fans who w ­ ere listening to the radio (implied in the recording’s location). We hear the audience responding to Silva with laughter and bursts of applause. And, of course, t­here is a third layering in the pres­ent, new fans created by the circulation of ­these recordings for commercial purposes as cd rec­ords and, more recently, in portable formats and streaming ser­vices, attesting to voice’s “contemporaneity of the audible.”41 ­Today, part of the delight of the rec­ord is its retro appeal, but I believe the per­ for­mance shines on its own and is now not simply a recycled curiosity. The radio audience saw Silva gesticulating in a way that censors found highly troubling. Silva cut her chops, as she said, in live venues and often staged her songs, pointing to her body, using arm and leg gestures, and contorting her face. The listeners through the radio waves ­were not privy to this staging, but the inclusion of the studio audience in the broadcast engaged them in the live moment, allowing them to experience Silva’s interaction with the live audience and her brilliant use of humor. Th ­ ese audiences ­were perhaps more savvy than more recent ones, which persist in a damaging forgetting. Back then, listeners knew that Chencha was a character clearly separated from Silva, that Myrta was an artistic persona and not a document of Silva’s private life. They responded to her vocal, queer, negative virtuosity. “Nada” is a reference to her own hit, more specifically to negativity in its productive aspect. The rest of the verse, “I am not prettier than other ­women, but I’m not any uglier, ­either,” which elicits burst of laughter from the audience, is a cipher. At first it sounds like she is stating she is average looking and not the prettiest. Upon critical examination, the statement emerges as a negation of a negation. What is the artist r­ eally saying? Th ­ ere is no absolutely settled meaning for this and other phrases, like the “Nada” verse, “I w ­ ill no longer be called Myrta.” The import ­here is Silva’s conscious deployment of 36  Chapter 1

the utterance in its “nothingness” or signifierness, in its paradoxically “full emptiness.”42 Silva’s given name, Myrta, does not appear in this live “Por algo será.” She refers to herself indirectly as Chencha (she re-­creates a dialogue with an addressee of unspecified gender, who, she claims, desires her in spite of her gait, which is like Chencha’s). Silva had inaugurated this pro­cess of substitution and linking with the gesture of erasure of her given name (“I ­will no longer be called Myrta”). As with the earlier “Mis tres novios” and “Nada,” in “Por algo será” Silva underscores cadence (“Será que . . . ​yo tengo un tumbaíto” [Must be . . . ​I have a ­little rhythm]). It is worth noting, for ­those unfamiliar with the Cuban repertoire, that Silva is quoting a Cuban song about cadence in her soneo (“El tumbaíto”), which she herself had recorded in 1946 with the Pérez Prado Orchestra; she quotes the song and her recording of the song, a kind of metonymy squared. The point is that the content of the “full emptiness” of voice is musical, not personal. Her signifiers’ meanings relate to t­ hese objects that are at once immaterial (like ­music) and material (in all senses of the word: They are sensory objects and also commodities in the chain of production).

I D­ ON’T DENY IT Notions of ­middle-­class normalcy and morality threatened to derail Silva’s ­career in Cuba when she started ­running into trou­ble with that country’s censorship board in 1947. As Bohemia, Cuba’s premier entertainment magazine of the time, reported, “Dr. Alberto Cruz, Minister of Communications, signed the dense tangle of papers, and he summarized his findings thus: Radio 1010 could not keep airing its program, ‘Radio Coctel Musical,’ ­because Myrta Silva, one of the program’s regulars, had performed two guarachas, ‘Camina como Chencha la gambá’ and ‘El bombón de Myrta,’ the lyr­ics of which ­were completely pornographic.”43 The article mentions that ­there ­were rumors that the show was censored b ­ ecause Radio 1010 was a Communist station. The minister is quoted as replying, “No, ­there is nothing po­liti­cal ­behind it. What happened was that Myrta Silva had performed two songs that had been banned by the Radio Bureau. And on top of that, when she says ‘por aquí no ha pasado un tranvía’ [a streetcar h ­ asn’t run between my legs], she makes a 44 very provocative gesture.” The Communist Party owned Radio 1010, but it was a purely commercial venture. It’s probable that Silva’s sexualized per­for­mance was the reason for the censorship. In fact, the nascent Radio Ethics Commission banned Getting Off . . . the Nation  37

several Myrta Silva guaracha per­for­mances: “Adiós Comay Gata” (Goodbye, Comay Gata), “Camina como Chencha la gambá” (She walks like Chencha, the pigeon-­toed ­woman), “Déjamelo ver” (Let me see it), and “Échale tierra y tápalo” (Cover it with a ­little dirt).45 Censorship in the ­music industry was a common practice.46 What was not common was a single artist with so many songs banned from the airwaves. A few years ­later, Silva would have to submit to censors in Puerto Rico too, possibly marked as an always already obscene singer. Of ­these banned songs, “Camina como Chencha la gambá” deserves detailed scrutiny. It birthed the Chencha signifier in Silva’s c­areer. The folk Chencha originated earlier, possibly in Spain; it was Silva’s idea to create a song based on the folk pun, “camina como Chencha la gambá” (she walks like Chencha, who is pigeon-­toed). On more than one occasion, Silva explained that she created characters or situations and presented them to songwriters who created guarachas based on her ideas. The songwriter for “Chencha,” Ñico Saquito, had Silva to thank for making several of his songs into hits.47 The original recording of “Chencha” in 1946 is historically significant. It was Silva’s most successful recording and Fernández’s most pop­u­lar guaracha, out of dozens he penned.48 Silva performed “Chencha” in social spaces as diverse as the Tropicana of Havana, the Escambrón Beach Club in Puerto Rico, and New York’s Teatro Hispano. The song capitalized on the meanings the Myrta signifier had by then accrued as an oversexed ­woman, a si­mul­ta­ neously disgusting and desirable object. The mulata type of the teatro bufo, nineteenth-­century Cuban comedic theater, must have been the songwriter’s model (this would explain a verse in the song: “ahora dicen los malos mulatos” [the evil mulatos are now saying]).49 “Chencha” is a tango-­congo with a slow tempo, a genre associated with blackness in Cuban and Ca­rib­bean pop­u­lar ­music of the early twentieth ­century, evoking what Robin Moore describes as a “generic primitivism.”50 As with the portrait a la guarachera with the Cuarteto Victoria, Silva again functioned as the nothing or empty space into which vari­ous gender and racial meanings ­were deposited, but not elucidated or examined. Nor ­were they, properly speaking, sutured. Their “display in nondisplay” is their salient characteristic; they are neither affirmed nor denied. Silva was regarded as a sexual bombshell, but was white skinned, at a remove from blackness; she was regarded as licentious, but every­one knew she “played with the other team,” as René Espí jokingly recounted. Possibly Silva herself disidentified with the tango-­congo rhythm for two reasons: It did not suit her improvisational style and it was coded black. 38  Chapter 1

“Chencha” pres­ents a knowing speaker, aware that she is squarely on public display. The song’s hook concerns the subject’s overexamination by the listeners, who are visually engaged in “figuring her out” (or more precisely, her gait: “camina como” [she walks like]). The gait is supposed to reveal sexual be­hav­ior, solving the societal riddle of what must be figured out. The scopic should install mastery on the part of the subject who fixes the object with the gaze; it should provide a reassurance regarding the viewer’s supremacy in the “knowing game.” Despite being her best-­selling rec­ord ever (more than half a million copies, an astronomical number for the time), Silva hated the original recording. She stated the arrangement was “horrible.”51 Perhaps her retrospective disgust had to do with the fact that she became indelibly associated with this song. As in negation in psychoanalysis, she may not have owned up fully to her resentment, especially b ­ ecause it aided her c­ areer, helped her in her goal of financial in­de­pen­dence, and provided the persona for her tv character years ­later. Peter Szendy has written about the arrangement as a very specialized act of listening.52 Following Szendy’s insight, and factoring in Silva’s disgust at the first recording, we can theorize that she could not inscribe her own listening in the first period of Chencha’s per­for­mance life, something she achieved in Chencha’s second period. The second recording of 1961 testifies to this change. Silva arranged the song, led the band, and produced the recording. With this in mind, let’s examine what unfolds in the per­for­mance, starting with the opening stanza: Que yo nací con mi pata gambá Igualita, igualita que Chencha Y qué tengo que ver yo con Chencha Si nací con mi pata gambá So I was born pigeon-­toed Exactly like Chencha Why in the world does that make me like Chencha I’m pigeon-­toed from birth ­ ere are significant differences between the second recording of 1961 and the Th first of 1946. Tone is salient, an ele­ment that c­ an’t be notated with accuracy but is pres­ent from the very first verses. It’s not simply more comical than the first recording; it is cynical. Additionally, Silva engages percussive voice Getting Off . . . the Nation  39

much more than in the first version by playing with the beat at vari­ous moments. For example, she slows the tempo in minute 1:19 (“La ge-­e-­ente me gri-­ita Chencha”) to then accelerate it in the next verse, when she ­belts out a soneo (“Camina camina camina camina camina camina Chencha”). Silva also changed the arrangement. The ostinato rhythm is gone, replaced by a cha cha cha. Silva used brass completely differently from the first version, with full blares and comedic embellishments slightly reminiscent of circus m ­ usic (like “Mis tres novios”). She stopped the orchestra before each repetition of the song’s refrain, as in the first version. However, in employing trumpets in minor chords, the refrain’s musical phrase turns ominous. Silva repurposed the playful key of the cha cha cha, bringing a slight hint of the uncanny into the recording. The orchestra goes from festive to retributive in few seconds. We hear a new cultural doll, created by the ugly intersection of ­music per­ for­mance and a nakedly profit-­driven entertainment industry in the postwar years, which disregarded the bound­aries between public and private and capitalized on this blurring. This doll sings like she is refusing to comply with the scopic fantasy of dominance, like the dolls of horror movies. [Orchestra full stop] Pero camina como Chencha [trumpet blare in minor key] ([Chorus:] la gambá) Camina como Chencha [trumpet blare in minor key] (la gambá) Ay camina como Chencha [trumpet blare in minor key] (la gambá) Camina como Chencha [trumpet blare in minor key] (la gambá) [Orchestra full stop] ­ ese changes opened up musical space for Silva to elaborate on the song via Th her virtuosic use of voice and masterly command of cadence. Silva achieved a memorable per­for­mance of Chencha in her 1946 recording, one attuned to the listening public’s desire. Yet by changing the song’s arrangement and irreverently altering its lyr­ics in the 1960s, by superbly injecting her comedic asides in order to mortally puncture the fantasy of self-­reference, Silva “rewrote” the song to conform to her artistic desire: to embody the psychoanalytic nothing she put into play with “Nada” in 1942, the signifier’s full emptiness. Inserting ­these asides into the written bars of the ­music of “Chencha” had the effect of a sonic infiltration of meaning. This second recording largely transformed the reception of this song. Silva’s reper­for­mance suggests that listeners’ engagement with the visual leaves the dominant subject open to the scopic illusion of mastery and therefore ripe for 40  Chapter 1

the symbolic reordering the voice as part-­object can achieve. Hence, Chencha’s gait, a would-be visual clue, is overpowered and disarmed by vocality. The r­ unning commentary Silva offers at the end of the verses, switching from sung lyr­ics to spoken interjections while keeping her timing intact, elaborates a parallel narrative based on negation (in the psychoanalytic sense). “Que yo nací con mi pata gambá (yo no lo niego)” (So I was born pigeon-­toed [I ­don’t deny it]), becomes the ­battle cry. What is the meaning of an affirmation tendered as a negation? It is signifierness, a par­tic­u­lar nothing developed across two de­cades since the original nothing of “Nada.”53 “Nada, ya no me llamo Myrta” (Nothing, I ­will no longer be called Myrta) is reformulated when Silva changes the song’s lyr­ics: “Ya me cambiaron el nombre, ahora me llaman Chencha Silva” (They have gone so far as to change my name; now they call me Chencha Silva), presenting the monstrous hybrid of Chencha Silva in the place where Myrta once was. Silva responds in the negative, to negative statements that ­were only expressed in fleeting gossip and chilling anonymous hate mail received in her tv offices by the time of her second recording of “Chencha.” “Chencha” is not equal to Silva herself; the song explic­itly refers in a first-­person singing voice to a character in the third person. The lyr­ics had made this evident since the first recording, but the per­for­mance, including Silva’s improvisations in 1961, amplify the distance between the flesh-­and-­blood Silva and her character, in the spirit of commentary about such equivocations. By the beginning of the 1960s, “Chencha la gambá” had become a party staple, part of the collective archive of “ugly feelings.” Silva effected an ironic distancing at the very moment of the recording, so that e­ very time we listen to the per­for­mance inscribed in the rec­ord, we can witness Silva practicing an ethics, returning the listener to the problematic societal characterization of Silva and, by extension, any social subject placed in the dangerous position of scapegoat. The pun of Chencha’s gait entailed the knowledge that Silva herself was queer and that, according to the song’s heteronormative logic, she would be hard pressed to be a gambá. Silva’s reper­for­mance underscores the symbolic vio­lence of the original guaracha. She emphasizes taunts on the street and the societal occlusion inherent in the name change, from the empty set of Myrta (her given name is not included in the song) to Chencha Silva, an entity based on the shared investment in gossip about the ­actual Silva’s sexual activity. Purely sonorous and nonlinguistic interjections such as tone, sneers, and scoffs powerfully launch a cynical reaction to the public identification between artist and character, implied in the first version through an abject Getting Off . . . the Nation  41

figure 1.4 ​­Album cover, Myrta Silva, Camina como Chencha, Ansonia 1286, 1961. It portrays the streetcar passing between Silva’s legs, mentioned in the title song. Notice the gold left ankle bracelet with the singer’s name, “Myrta.”

treatment of voice imposed by the arrangement. In 1961, Silva proffers a reading simultaneous with the per­for­mance of the song, creating a doubleness that registers as more than simply funny or possibly not that funny. The final verse is a resounding, potentially painful assumption of the persona and name of Chencha: “¡Que yo camino como Chencha!” (So I walk like Chencha!), Silva shouts, in a manner quite distinct from the original recording’s fade-­out, which featured Silva’s hushed singing reflecting the extimate (si­mul­ta­neously inside and outside) nature of gossip.54 Figure 1.4 is the cover for the long-­playing rec­ord that included the second “Camina como Chencha,” Myrta Silva con Orquesta: Camina como Chencha. Ansonia Rec­ords, a U.S.-­based com­pany, released this lp recorded in Mexico. Ansonia had targeted the nostalgia market since its beginnings, with a par­tic­u­lar investment in the Latino mi­grant communities of the United States. Silva complied, to an extent, with the mandate for nostalgia. This lp is a compilation of earlier Myrta Silva material, which had been released as 78s,

42  Chapter 1

by then obsolete. Unlike other lps of the time, t­hese are not the original 78 tracks converted to 33-1/3 rpm, however. They are new tracks Silva recorded and combined to create a musical document of her global, musical personality. At this time, the song “Camina como Chencha” was the fan favorite Myrta Silva song; thus it is the ­album’s title track and inspiration for the cover art. Silva is shown as fetish. Her lower legs stand in for the total body, photographed from b ­ ehind. The cover shows a carefully cut shaft of light emanating from Silva’s legs, very vis­i­ble against the dark background of the rest of the cover, which simulates a stage floor. The shaft of light leads the eye directly to the streetcar that is “passing between her legs.” This image was created to echo the stanza where Silva is responding to accusations that she can accommodate “un tranvía” (a streetcar), a pun for a very large male sexual organ coming at full force, also referred to at points in the song as a “camión” (truck) and the “telón” (curtain) of the stately Teatro Nacional in Havana, all, obviously, hyperbolic renditions of the phallus. Yet the artist corrected the fetish, so to speak, and figuratively stopped the tranvía in its tracks. The ankle bracelet with the name Myrta on her left leg merits some discussion. I have heard that this bracelet was a Nuyorican style touch; in other quarters, I have heard it said that city lesbians wore ankle bracelets as a code. I have not been able to verify e­ ither claim, but I find the possibilities in­ter­est­ing since, to my knowledge, ­women artists de la farándula (in show business) did not wear ankle bracelets. To be sure, they did not display them in public. Nor did they wear jewelry with their names. A ­ fter 1960, Silva had bracelets, rings, necklaces, and brooches made saying ­either Myrta or Myrta Silva in gold and diamonds. This display is dif­fer­ent from the bourgeois ostentation of society ladies, with which some viewers have confused it. The gesture is not reduced to an individual desire to boast of wealth. When Silva alluded to her own riches, she spoke in terms of financial security and artistic freedom, not of having increased her value as a social being defined by class belonging. Silva embossed her name in gold as the only ­woman to do so in a milieu that thought of itself according to the symbolics of class stratification. Elites and haute bourgeois wore their wealth in spaces designated for interaction only between members, who collectively turned their nose up at every­one ­else, usually out of public earshot. Their code of propriety or, to use Bourdieu’s term, their distinction depended on their withdrawal of ostentation from the larger societal gaze. Silva ­didn’t care much for this distinction. She returned to circulating the quilting point of Myrta as a signifier.

Getting Off . . . the Nation  43

DODGEBALL The two “Chencha” recordings bookend a period that saw Silva finishing her contract with Victor, dealing with charges of obscenity, relocating to her homeland, and launching her broader entertainment ­career, which was very successful by the time of the Ansonia lp release of Camina como Chencha. It h ­ adn’t been easy. Silva appeared on the radio, including in her own program, Una hora con nosotros (An hour with us), and freelanced on tv shows beginning in 1954. She stated, “The newly born Puerto Rican tele­vi­sion did not want me; they thought I was too vulgar.” 55 The nationalist under­pinnings that pop­u­lar ­music acquired around this time, and the imperative to formulate a clean national repertoire, corresponded to the hegemonic proj­ect of the Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party, first established in 1948 and which r­ ose to power in 1952. The party dictated the course of Puerto Rican politics for de­cades, specifically working the cultural realm as a plan for governmentality. Silva had no choice but to adapt to the commercial and tourist vision of Puerto Rico that became prevalent. Given the clash between her own ethics and the mandated program of culture as a stratified enterprise, where pop­u­lar culture should represent a moral, national essence, Silva continued to deal on a daily basis with censors. Homo­sexuality, it goes without saying, was a taboo subject in all media and remained so for de­cades. In 1956, wapa-­t v, one of Puerto Rico’s and Latin Amer­i­ca’s first tele­vi­sion stations, hired Silva to create the tv show Una hora contigo (An hour with you). It was a typical 1950s American-­style variety show. First, Silva would sing the show’s theme song, a bolero she wrote, “Una hora contigo.” Segments included a fashion runway hosted by the actress Velda González, invited singers, Silva herself singing, and a humorous segment titled “Tira y tápate” (Dodgeball), which fast became notorious since it toyed with the discursively allowed and the not allowed, bound­aries of taste, and class stratification. Silva had to procure advertising revenue, and she marketed products during this very segment.56 She spoke directly to the camera while she was answering fan mail, bantering with tele­vi­sion crews and gossiping about the colony’s brand-­ new fantasy object, celebrities. Silva’s costume lampooned the working-­class comadre, and she baptized her character Chencha, recurring to the signifier that she had deployed in multiple hits of the 1940s, in counterpoint to Myrta. The 1950s creation differed from her character, which, as we saw, corresponded to the mulata of the teatro bufo, a racist ste­reo­type of an oversexed ­woman. Rapidly, Chencha became a second artistic persona of Silva’s, following the quilting point the char44  Chapter 1

acter had become in her repertoire. Chencha developed into a homegrown variant of the delirious subject, positioned at the bar of vari­ous repressions affecting discourse in Puerto Rico.57 The negative virtuosity of Silva’s Myrta persona started transferring into the Chencha character. This altered Silva’s overall artistic existence; she borrowed Myrta’s linguistic seductions to flesh out Chencha, but Myrta could not remain simply intact. Although Silva continued to be piercingly cynical, dispensing a brand of wisdom attuned to the changes of developmentalism, she could not completely control the fate of the two signifiers she had brilliantly put into cultural play through vocal and musical per­for­mance. Voice can become a commodity as much as anything ­else, and its methexic quality as sound ­doesn’t guarantee that it ­won’t be put at the ser­vice of commodity capitalism.58 Silva had embodied sexual desire through her per­for­mance, working its displacement through her voice as part-­object. Now she ventriloquized a certain upsetting superego, a kind of comic Panopticon, and into this voice ­were grafted the paranoia of the small colony over its presumptive nothingness and the concomitant injunction to become something in the world. The force of Silva’s musical voice as Lacan’s part-­object was not destroyed, but it’s fair to say it changed aim, as we ­shall examine. No extant footage remains of the tele­vi­sion show. The lp Myrta Silva presenta: Una hora contigo is a wonderful material object that provides some sense of its visual and aural content (figures 1.5 and 1.6).59 The ­album art portrays Silva in Chencha costume atop a tv camera; to her side Olga Guillot plays the piano, accompanied by other performers in con­spic­u­ous spotlighting. On the flip side, we see Chencha selling Lechoncito lard live. Lechoncito’s makers paid for the rec­ord; we see the block of lard in a skillet in the lower-­ right corner. Since lp rec­ords ­were relatively cheap to produce, and artists often worked for a pittance or f­ ree, the rec­ords became a form of advertising. It was not a purely expedient use of lps but could be in play generally as artists looked to the business sector to stay competitive in a cutthroat market. Silva wrote a column titled “Tira y tápate” for the Cuban exile publication Bohemia libre puertorriqueña, from 1961 to 1965, a print companion to her tele­vi­sion show. Although a ­silent medium, ele­ments of Silva’s complex tele­vi­ sion voice become audible. It is likely that Silva’s tele­vi­sion banter as Chencha was very similar or even identical to this print version, so we have a fairly good document of her spoken word per­for­mance and an aphonic facsimile of her mainly sonorous presence. We can imagine her sneers and scoffs as we read the segment “Échate p’acá” (Come over h ­ ere) and “hear” her switch to Getting Off . . . the Nation  45

figure 1.5 ​­Album cover, Myrta Silva presenta: Una hora contigo, lpo 001. Empacadora del Caribe, San Juan, Puerto Rico, late 1950s or early 1960s. The ­album was created to advertise her tv show of the same name. The cartoon shows Silva atop a tv camera and portrays the show’s guests: the Cuban singer Olga Guillot is at the piano.

another voice in the bulk of the column, typically divided into segments like “Noticias del patio” (Local m ­ usic industry news) and “Noticias de afuera” (What’s happening in the ­music world abroad), or their equivalents. The column features many photo­graphs of her guests and of Silva with multiple celebrities from Puerto Rico, Latin Amer­i­ca, the United States, and Eu­rope. The key interplay between the scopic and the aural can be gleaned from the pages, even if the sound of the show is now lost. The gossip segment was clearly the commercial hook, but Silva’s main interest, just as clearly, lay in documenting m ­ usic as it was played and listened to by Puerto Ricans. The bulk of the column concerns entertainment news and reviews and responses to fan mail, with a ­couple of paragraphs of show business gossip tossed in for good mea­sure. The range of Silva’s professional networks, her evident love of all ­music and musicians, and her belief in the importance of a native ­music industry have been, sadly, forgotten in ­today’s memory of 46  Chapter 1

figure 1.6 ​Flip side of ­album cover, Myrta Silva presenta: Una hora contigo, with images from tv show of Silva selling the sponsor’s product, Lechoncito lard. The first tracks on both sides are the serious and jocular, eponymous theme songs of the show, respectively: “Una hora contigo” (An hour with you) for the opening, and “Tira y tápate” (Dodgeball) for the humor segment. Silva is shown in character as Chencha.

her. Silva’s expressive qualities shine through in her columns, which feature her trademark, cynical stance ­toward life. She displayed an ethics similar to the Foucauldian care of the self and was hardly as superficial and banal as Chencha is remembered t­ oday. Rather, Chencha’s intent was to speak truth to power.60 Silva used gossip’s profitability to aid her in undertaking her life commitment: the promotion of all art and all artists, in Puerto Rico and beyond. It can be said that one of her transgressions was to refuse the strict separation between autochthonous and foreign ­music in the rising tide of cultural nationalism and insularity. Notwithstanding her success, instead of simply inspiring pride and affection (as she might have expected), Silva experienced an ambivalent reception in Puerto Rico. Silva forever remembered her years based in Cuba in an idealized way, prob­ably ­because she had experienced a mea­sure of musical belonging Getting Off . . . the Nation  47

t­ here. Some Puerto Rican contemporaries went so far as to pejoratively label her “una boricua cubana” (a Cuban Puerto Rican). Many Puerto Ricans still mistakenly take Silva for Cuban. Silva had sung what l­ater came to be labeled Cuban m ­ usic, had had success in Havana, and had acquired impor­tant business contacts who made their way into 1950s Puerto Rican tele­vi­sion and became exiles upon the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Yet we must not underestimate Silva’s ­labor to set up her successful c­ areer in Puerto Rico. We must also remember that Silva wore many hats on her show. She produced the show, procured the advertising, hosted, and performed as a singer and comedian, filling the jobs of at least five ­people. Nothing was handed to her. Adding to the hurtful rejection of Silva on such dubious, nativist grounds, I have encountered several specialists who believe a technical diminishing of Silva’s singing voice happened around this period, thus justifying Silva’s turn to tv and her gossip character. Silva never lost her voice; she had the same instrument in the late 1950s as in the late 1930s. The conditions for artistic success in Puerto Rico u ­ nder the aegis of the newly founded Estado Libre Asociado (ela, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) required of Silva to adopt a more normative repertoire, one that reflected immutable Puerto Rican values. Th ­ ese values, it need not be said, ­were not intrinsic to Puerto Ricans but proceeded from a narrative that was pedagogically instilled and vaunted in other arms, particularly tourism. The dominant narrative of ­music stressed the centrality of Puerto Rico’s g­ reat songwriter Rafael Hernández, and ­music pedagogy stressed classical training.61 Silva is, arguably, the greatest interpreter of Hernández’s comic repertoire, so she was able to slot into the values discourse through this corpus. Some songs of the nativist repertoire succeeded beyond their packaged call to mass pedagogy. A still of Myrta Silva from the movie Las canciones unidas (The United Nations of song, 1960) shows Silva performing the standard “Esos no son de aquí” (They are not Puerto Rican).62 Silva is the best performer of this Rafael Hernández classic, recognizable to generations of Puerto Ricans, with its catchy call and response: Los que dicen “yes my dear,” esos no son de aquí Los que dicen “ba-­bería,” esos no son de aquí Los que dicen guajirito, esos no son de aquí Los que decimos jibarito, ¡esos sí, esos sí! The ­people who say, “Yes my dear,” they are not Puerto Rican The ­people who say “barbershop” [with a Havana accent], they are not Puerto Rican 48  Chapter 1

The ­people who say, “guajirito” [Cuban word for peasant, country dweller], they are not Puerto Rican ­Those of us who say “jibarito” [Puerto Rican word for peasant, country dweller] are truly Puerto Rican, truly Puerto Rican! Silva was ideal for this song ­because she had worked negation so extraordinarily into her per­for­mance persona, as we have seen with a few examples of her extensive repertoire. “Esos no son de aquí” pres­ents successive stanzas in which being Puerto Rican is first defined in three verses stating what being Puerto Rican is not, before the affirmation of what being Puerto Rican is in the last verse of each stanza. My paraphrase is less generic than the catchy original, which includes verses that can be easily transposed into other national contexts wishing to proclaim specificity by simply substituting terms, since “de aquí” would apply to any country. Perhaps this is why the song eventually became known unofficially in Puerto Rico as “Cuchifritos,” since the word for Puerto Rican fried fin­ger food is a more unique marker than the song’s ­legal name. Las canciones unidas is a loose amalgam of ­music clips from dif­fer­ent parts of the world (not just Latin Amer­i­ca), barely held together by the conceit of the United Nations calling for artistic repre­sen­ta­tions to foster world peace and understanding. Silva was chosen to represent Puerto Rico, specifically the newly established ela. This ­great clip is available via YouTube and has been viewed by thousands of Internet users. It opens with an aerial view of downtown San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, undoubtedly chosen for its modernity (we see the snazzy Condado waterfront with its luxury h ­ otels and images of the island as a tropical paradise). Silva and a chorus sing a few bars of “Preciosa” (Beautiful one), a Rafael Hernández anticolonial tribute to the island and Puerto Rico’s unofficial anthem. A ­ fter a minute, the movie switches to tropical ­music, to loud horns and swift percussion. The locale is prob­ably very near or in the Escambrón Beach Club, which was an exclusive enclave between the Condado and Old San Juan sectors of San Juan (figure 1.7). A staple of period postcards, the Escambrón hosted many musicians from Puerto Rico and abroad, catering to affluent and ­middle-­class Puerto Ricans and tourists (especially Americans) since the 1930s. Perhaps what is most striking about Silva’s clip, in its Technicolor vision of Puerto Rico as an island paradise, is the visual separation of musicians and dancers. Racially, the divide is all too apparent. All the dancers are blanquitos, light or white skinned. The w ­ omen dancers pres­ent an additional contrast to Silva. They are statuesque and dressed skimpily as they cavort about the beach. Yet, race and class differences Getting Off . . . the Nation  49

figure 1.7 ​Myrta Silva performing the Rafael Hernández classic, “Esos no son de aquí,” with Cortijo y su Combo, in the Mexican movie Las canciones unidas, 1959. The site is the Escambrón Beach Club in San Juan. Silva leads the band.

notwithstanding, musicians and dancers together exist for the foreign imagination as harbingers of both desire and investment possibilities. Silva’s band was none other than the groundbreaking Cortijo y su Combo, which completely revolutionized both the playing and the role of Afro–­Puerto Rican ­music, particularly bomba and plena, in the 1950s and beyond. Rafael Cortijo can be seen playing the timbal set. While Silva’s positioning against the musicians is slightly reminiscent of the early portrait with the Cuarteto Victoria dressed a la guarachera, she is a quite dif­fer­ent punctum, to recall Roland Barthes, from that earlier image of the white-­skinned singer surrounded by brown-­and black-­skinned musicians. Silva leads the band, orchestrates the breaks, indicates the tempo changes and the brass section entrances, and controls the volume. The clip amply demonstrates that Silva had lost none of her musical abilities or performative power; she still had her cosa, her ­thing, as she sang in “Yo tengo una cosa” (I have a t­hing) in Myrta Silva y Daniel Santos en tv, a ­later, mid-1960s lp. When Silva’s musical and social power exponentially increased with her flush years (from the late 1950s on), so did rejection and shaming. The game started to become nasty. Silva stopped producing her show on Puerto Rican tele­vi­sion 50  Chapter 1

in the 1960s. She l­ater refuted the rumors that gave a network ratings decision as the reason, mentioning specific trou­ble with censorship.63 Culturally speaking, ­there was a discernible move ­toward removing the so-­called unpalatable ele­ments of Puerto Rican society from media visibility, replacing the “socially disgusting” with models of squeaky clean artists (presumed to be more moral) ­toward the m ­ iddle of the de­cade. Undeniably, the ascendancy of youth culture played a part, as the ­music industry sought newness to extract the most consumption from viewers and listeners and started to look down on older musicians, relegating them to nostalgia formats. Silva began to speak of a split between two selves in myriad interviews: “Who am I? The one who unveils herself in her ballads and songs: a frustrated romantic. Every­thing ­else is a mask.”64 It may seem odd that the same artist cultivated the cynical and conventional positions si­mul­ta­neously. In one of her guises, she was uncompromising and unsentimental. In the other, she reclaimed the membership that ­women’s sentimentality afforded.65 Silva’s splitting certainly resonates with queers and other socially disgusting subjects, who have for de­cades described fielding multiple social identities at ­great personal cost, who have spoken about cloaking a true or intimate being u ­ nder the protection of a necessarily hardened social exterior. Yet it is still a conundrum that her identification with the bolero became so strong at this point in her life. In the 1960s, Silva became progressively more interested in songwriting, specifically of boleros, than her much-­lauded singing, especially of guarachas. In her l­ater analy­sis, she spoke as if the two always already stood for incompatible selves: “The truth is that an intrinsically incompatible artistic real­ity lived in me. I was first successful as a guaracha singer, which I pop­u­lar­ized in mass taste. But when it came to songwriting, my preference was for the romantic bolero. The singer overshadowed [opacó] the composer. Several years passed, which saw the rise and fall of other pop m ­ usic genres. And then Myrta the composer emerged and gained the upper hand, and the originary situation was reversed: This time, the composer dethroned [destronó] the singer.”66 It could be that Silva, consciously or unconsciously, anticipated that Puerto Ricans would not memorialize a musician in her lifetime, whereas they definitely would a songwriter. For de­cades, Puerto Ricans valued compositores as creators. At the same time, they diminished musicianship expressed in per­for­mance, so Silva’s impression was completely on the mark. Perhaps ­there is no better example of national nastiness than the insidious accusation that Silva stole two songs from her con­temporary, the Puerto Rican songwriter and show business personality Sylvia Rexach. The lurid Getting Off . . . the Nation  51

quality of the theft tale, the hagiographic narrative surrounding Rexach and her drinking prob­lem as a personal weakness she could not overcome, and the consistent attacks on Silva in Puerto Rico leave its veracity open to question.67 Was this accusation born out of gender panic and virulent homophobia? Dozens of musicians respected Silva, among them the towering stars of the Latin American constellation who recorded her boleros. It is not a coincidence that during the same time Silva acquired the epithet La Gorda de Oro, which, far from being an affectionate term, signaled loathing and disgust over an overweight ­woman past her thirties being unabashedly sexual, on the one hand, and hopelessly romantic, on the other, without parading a legible male object of desire for the public view. It appears that the collective was willing to be entertained by Silva and benefit from her business genius, but not willing to extend to her the mantle that it happily bestowed on the suffering and abject Rexach (a common construction of the modern ­woman musician’s life).68 Ultimately, was Silva’s queerness the source of her culturally mandated estrangement from the bolero? Facing the chokehold of censorship and realizing, in her prophetic way, that she would be trapped in dominant scripts excluding her from musical creation and renovation, we can surmise that her desire to avoid an artistic dead end was the one, chief reason for her move to the vibrant New York City. The artist still had one more round of the game in her.

THEY CALL IT BUGALÚ In 1965, Silva went into what she ­later called “voluntary exile.” She spent four years in New York City producing, hosting, and performing on the pioneering and critically acclaimed tv show, The Myrta Silva Show, for which (as we saw above) she won the prize for Best Variety Show in the New York Area in 1965. Silva’s identity as a Latina precursor is an in­ter­est­ing and unexplored aspect of her life. While reading about her in old newspapers and the entertainment press, one finds mentions of her residence in New York and identification with the community. Her “Tira y tápate” column is evidence of her heartfelt attachment. She always included a segment discussing Puerto Rican artists in New York and the United States, giving fans a prominent role and speaking highly of Puerto Rican mi­grants, which ran ­counter to how mi­grants ­were regarded in Puerto Rico ­until the very recent historical past: as traitors or at best poor facsimiles of the national “original,” as subjects irrevocably damaged by their displacement. 52  Chapter 1

While a transnational market was being created to include the mi­grants and cater to a panethnic belonging, I do not doubt that Silva’s allegiances ran much deeper than commercial gain. She felt that the audiences in New York had made her a star.69 Silva clearly had a proto-­Latino audience in mind when she relocated. In her show’s first anniversary, she opened with the following monologue in Spanish: “My dear tv viewers: It seems like only yesterday that this jíbara from Arecibo arrived at Channel 47 to try and produce Hispanic [Latino] tele­vi­sion for all of you. My show, your show, Una hora contigo . . . ​is now a year old. I would like to thank . . . ​not only all Puerto Ricans but also the legion of Latin Americans that live together in this metropolis of New York.”70 Silva was not merely an entrepreneur who exploited a market niche. She thought of the Latino community as held together by cultural needs and a shared economic existence in the wonderful but difficult new home of the city. Nevertheless, the diasporic community held on, sometimes too tightly, to the national-­popu­lar framework for pop m ­ usic. Regarding the Chencha signifier, the queer negative virtuosity had fewer and fewer opportunities to come to the fore. “Chencha,” biting humor and social commentary notwithstanding, had transformed into a queerly normative formulation of w ­ omen as consuming citizens. By the mid-1960s, Silva had become overly identified with her gossip queen persona in Puerto Rico, rendering her musical voices (as a singer and songwriter) secondary. The New York show remedied some of that. The identity of this show, of which some clips are available on YouTube, is illustrated in Puerto Rico canta y baila (Puerto Rico dances and sings), recorded in 1966 with musicians of the Tito Rodríguez Orchestra. Its title echoes a revue Silva presented in Puerto Rico’s Tropicoro H ­ otel in May 1964, prior to her relocation. Pursuant to dominant formats catering to tourists in San Juan at the time, she included traditional, Puerto Rican folkloric genres of bomba and plena, which w ­ ere not ­really her repertoire. In a closing bolero, she refers to herself as a ­daughter of the Puerto Rican nation, very differently from her bolero temperament, reflected in her own “Qué sabes tú” (What do you know) or “Tengo que acostumbrarme” (I have to get used to it). She incorporated a chisme (gossip) track, echoing her “Tira y tápate” tv show segment. In fact, the cover shows Silva dancing in her Chencha costume, sans partner or orchestra. The cover’s back side features images of Silva on her Channel 47 tv show out of the Chencha costume, with luminaries such as Roberto Rohena, Tito Puente, and La Lupe. The liner notes are upbeat about Silva’s Spanish-­language tv shows for Latino consumers in the  U.S. market, and Silva is shown in a Getting Off . . . the Nation  53

figure 1.8 ​­Album cover, Myrta Silva, Canta canciones mi mamá no me enseñó (Songs my ­mother never taught me), Tico lp 1171, 1968. This is the third of three in a series and the only one to feature a solo artist.

pretty picture as Chencha, beaming. The images and liner notes convey a vision of a w ­ oman entrepreneur who is creating community for her folks in the city. One of the community’s needs was humor. Away from Puerto Rico, Silva used humor and specifically the obscene to return to the ethics as well as the parlando that had made her a h ­ ouse­hold name. The ­album Songs My ­Mother Never Taught Me, Volume III, was the third in a series of off-­color rec­ords produced by Tico Rec­ords in 1960s New York (figure 1.8). The liner notes portray Silva as “la reina del doble sentido” (the queen of double entendre), reframing her earliest title, “la reina de la guaracha.” On the a­ lbum cover, Silva looks up to the presumably Catholic sky, clasping her hands in prayer, making the ­album’s transgression both sonic and visual. Silva’s return to obscene ­music is quite the statement, almost a pornographic ars poetica. While the eruption of the obscene in a relatively mainstream way in the Latino recording industry is an impor­tant fact, it’s not my main interest ­here. The type of laughter it may elicit in the casual listener is not the type of laughter I’m pursuing in this 54  Chapter 1

analy­sis. Rather, I’m interested in the laughter that some listeners may key into if they tune into Silva’s call to thinking. Silva’s rec­ord is dif­fer­ent from the earlier ones in the series. Aside from being a solo rec­ord, it includes, like her earlier classics, a parallel commentary that initially may not be apprehended but is apparent once the listener has deci­ded to look out for it, perhaps ­after becoming more knowledgeable about what the signifier Myrta stood for —­ what Silva’s persona was —­ and what her tribulations as an artist ­under constant examination for deviance had been. Critical listening is now required to understand the comedic ramifications of this rec­ord, taken as innocuous ­because it is “merely” pornographic. What ­were the terms on which Silva invited the listener to enjoy her most obscene rec­ord? How did Silva negotiate this opportunity to articulate, once more, her principled cynicism? For starters, the rec­ord was exported to many places, so Silva was not confined to island reception. She regarded New York as a metropolitan city, with a sophisticated audience. The ­album exists between the coalescing Latino and the more traditional Latin American ­music markets. This in-­betweenness freed up performative space. It appealed to New York by adopting the bugalú, which was all the rage. It reformulated old classics from Silva’s Cuban period, catering to nostalgic listeners, but Silva changed the terms of this nostalgia through her per­for­mance as much as her alterations to the original lyr­ics. The new versions refuted all sentimentalism and use of song as a surrogate for a lost home. The recording included ele­ments that go beyond a normative rendition of comedy ­toward an opportunity for queering, such as the chorus of shrill backup singers in falsetto (all men), who humorously evoke the middlebrow rec­ords favored by upper-­middle-­class listeners. It was a patriarchal a­ lbum in its original conception, to be sure, and can be regarded as sexist, but Silva made quick work of transforming that content into a tour-­de-­force, ferocious reply to her many detractors. She played with insults jabbed at her (as in “Chencha la gambá”) and demolished any vision of Puerto Rican be­hav­ior as moral (as was preached at the time in all official outlets). Canciones is the evil twin of lps like Puerto Rico canta y baila and the forcibly cleaned-up collective repertoire. To add to the complexity of the ­album, Canciones was released with dif­fer­ ent covers for multiple markets. I offer two examples. In theory, ­there could have been a dif­fer­ent cover for ­every Latin American country, responding to regional imaginaries regarding Silva and her creations. The first is from Mexico, where the a­ lbum acquired a content warning, “Sólo para adultos” (For adults only). It featured a soft porn cover of a nearly nude ­woman outfitted in Getting Off . . . the Nation  55

figure 1.9 ​­Album cover, Myrta Silva, Canciones que mi mamá no me enseñó, Tico R-2570, 1969. The ­album acquired a content warning when it was published in Mexico: “Sólo para adultos” (For adults only). The cover shows a model in light bondage costume.

a highly stylized, light bondage costume (figure 1.9). The second cover, from Peru, is also soft porn, but this time the w ­ oman is shot through a camera filter to produce a diffuse, boudoir effect. Both are images of female sexual availability and both are completely at odds with the a­ ctual content of Myrta Silva’s rec­ord and her persona. We d ­ on’t know who deci­ded what to put on the covers for dif­fer­ent national markets, but we can definitely notice that the covers ­favor a white supremacist racial idea of beauty. Silva’s own body and pose, in what we presume to be the original cover, unmasks dominant fan­ tasy as hypocritical, bourgeois, and false. The ­really scandalous gesture is her insertion in the scopic regime: a rereading of the Camina como Chencha cover of Silva as fetish, as oversexed. We witness the resurgence of the horror movie doll, the speaking body, and the acoustic mirror, all wrapped into one explosive, “disgusting” package. Silva’s positioning is difficult to adjudicate. Th ­ ese multiple covers lend credence to the idea that the a­ lbum was in collusion with the dominant 56  Chapter 1

Latino ethos of the time. I ­will briefly outline how Silva was able to wrest her creation from this ethos and why she continued to compel critical listening and exhibit an understanding of what calls voice to thinking. To me, listening to the ­album without factoring in the Myrta Silva text is tantamount to having listened to a quarter of the rec­ord. (It’s also impor­tant to point out that Silva stands for an entire, varied, hemispheric, and successful ­career, and that her late creations grapple with the fate of so many artists who have long ­careers. They are often required to perform old hits and respond to public expectations that they may have outgrown and no longer relate to. This was certainly the case with Silva. In a sense, she is locked in a ­battle with her own iconic status.) “Dr. Bugalón” is the a­ lbum’s last out of ten tracks of nonstop, obscene humor. Throughout the rec­ord, Silva plays with calling herself loca, as in mentally ill, and also with clear overtones of sexual deviance. In this track, “loca” concretely refers to a drag queen. The song’s pun is that the doctor who is treating the queens is a bugarrón, a man in the active position who has sex with men while being married or publicly heterosexual. The doctor’s last name, the puerile pun “Bugalón,” mixes bugalú with bugarrón. What Silva does with this bugalú, however, can hardly be considered puerile. This song is significant ­because Silva engages gossip concerning homo­sexuality and therefore her own sexuality (a hot topic for Puerto Ricans at the time) by centering attention on the figure of the queen, for whom the closet is not an option and who interacts constantly with a normative male subject ­because of her desire and economic need. “Dr. Bugalón” names a psychiatrist, vaguely American (Dr. John Bugalón), who “specializes in treating queens.” In the other tracks, Silva’s improvs mention psychiatry and taunts about her own ­mental state, ­accusations which I’m certain she received in anonymous hate mail, a fact she repeatedly mentions in her “Tira y tápate” columns. An entirely recitative song, the chorus pitches in the doctor’s name at precise intervals as the refrain: “El doctor Bugalón . . . ​el doctor Bugalón.” Silva stages the song as a phone conversation between the receptionist, presumably a feminine ­woman (“señorita”), and herself. The receptionist asks Silva if she wants to be treated by the doctor, to which Silva responds, feigning amazement, that she ­doesn’t have that “prob­lem.” This response provokes an extreme reaction in the receptionist, to the point that she gets cut off “inexplicably” ­after ­every parlando chunk of Silva’s. The suggestion, not so hidden, is that finding out that Silva is not a loca but instead a “queer ­woman” has caused such sexual excitement in the receptionist that she has lost the line, amplified Getting Off . . . the Nation  57

by the entrance of the big band in increased tempo and volume. When the receptionist picks up the phone, she cannot place Silva as a w ­ oman, mistaking her for a loca. The identification of Silva with the loca is clear. The other interpretation, of course, is that the receptionist is revolted at the revelation of Silva’s gender nonconformity. The revulsion is erotically charged, tinged with sexual fascination: The receptionist keeps taking the call that fails ­after ­every long verse in parlando. The final recitative is: Óigame óigame óigame, ¿por qué se le cae tanto la comunicación? Haga algo porque aquí no se puede tener nada caído. . . . ​Estamos en un mundo que todo tiene que estar parado, señorita. . . . ​Bueno mire, déjele este mensajito a mi amiguita Rocío de la Noche. . . . ​Apunte apunte apunte apunte apunte. . . . ​Dígale que llamó Myrrrta para saber de su estado y que Pancho Tranca le manda recuerdos . . . ​y que Tato Machete ya salió con fianza por romperle lo que ella sabe a la Rata del Bronx . . . ​ y que todas sus amiguitas, como la Pani, la Michelle, la Miroslava, la Godina, la Roy, la Lirio del Valle, la Tina, y la María René, y yo, todas la recordamos . . . ​y que nos alegramos que esté bajo los cuidados del Dr. Bugalón . . . ​ Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, why do we keep getting cut off? Please do something about it ­because in this day and age we ­can’t be walking around with anything down. . . . ​Every­thing has to be erect, miss. . . . ​Please give this message to my friend Eve­ning Dew. . . . ​Write it down, write it down, write it down, write it down, write it down. . . . ​ Tell her Myrrrta called to see how she was d ­ oing and that Big Stick Steve sends her his love . . . ​and Machete Tato was let go on bail ­after he was arrested for breaking the Bronx Rat’s you-­know-­what . . . ​and that all her girlfriends, la Pani, la Michelle, la Miroslava, la Godina, la Roy, Lily of the Valley, la Tina, and la María René, and I, we all are thinking of her and are happy Dr. Bugalón is taking good care of her . . . ​ Silva returns to her given name, Myrta (as we have seen, a very power­ful name charged with meaning, which she emphasizes sonically by stretching the rolling “r,” much like “girrrrl”) to identify herself as the caller, and expresses familiarity with a scene by listing a string of names belonging to vari­ous queens in New York City, with herself as the last name on the list. Her alignment happens ­because queens are in a position similar to hers: objects of ridicule, dis58  Chapter 1

paraged as being physically deformed, presumptively hypersexual and gender noncompliant, yet also feared b ­ ecause of their power to unmask normative subjects and the hy­poc­risy of society. Silva ­doesn’t make them into martyred exemplars of the nothing. Instead, she posits them as walking negations. The tone is mocking; what is being mocked is not as clear-­cut, however. Is it the queens, or the policemen who beat them up, or hypocritical men who sleep with them and disown their desire, or generally the society that diagnoses queens as abnormal and in need of gender correction? The song, as mentioned, is entirely in parlando; it exhibits Silva’s intact swing, perfect musical timing, and eerie contemporaneity.

SPIT IT OUT During her finest musical moments, Silva had embodied the void that Mladen Dolar refers to as the “third level” of the voice, as the “blind spot in the call of the other and a disturbance to aesthetic appreciation.”71 Silva resumed El Show de Myrta Silva, with its “Tira y tápate” segment, on Puerto Rico’s Channel 11 for two years (1971–1973). Her original Chencha creation morphed into a drag queen persona, who sat in front of a crystal ball called Bola (Ball) and supposedly unmasked secrets about celebrity sex lives (in par­tic­u­lar, tales of marital infidelity, perverse sexuality, and homo­sexuality). This is the only image of Silva that Puerto Ricans remember t­ oday. Often they simply confuse the character with the artist, as if they ­were interchangeable, to the point of occluding Silva’s primary identity as an artist, ­whether singer or composer —­ forgetting she was also a producer, host, bandleader, and artist agent, among the many roles she took on during her ­career. ­There is scant extant footage of the 1970s character. ­Here is an excerpt from a typical tv monologue. This section addresses sexuality and particularly homo­sexuality: Bola, ¿cómo fue, Bola? Espepítamelo. Ah, que una fiesta muy elegante que empezó con champán, caviar y paté de foie (paté de foie es hígado de ganso, saben). Ah, cuando las burbujas empezaron a hacer efecto empezó el calor y . . . ​la gente se empezó a quitar la ropa. Había un productor escondido de estos. Empezó a bailar con un tremendo pollo. Él estaba de lo más embullaíto y estaba así pegaíto, y cuando el productor le preguntó a la bella damisela y le dijo, “¿Cómo te llamas, mi amor?,” la damisela le respondió: “Mi nombre es Jorge.” ¡Eso es bueno que te pase, por no saber Getting Off . . . the Nation  59

adónde vas! Jorge o Georgie es lo mismo baby. . . . ​¡Cómo, Bola! ¡Ay no, Bola, si no me lo juras, no te lo creo! Ball, what? What is it, Ball? Come on, spit it out. Oh, I see, ­there was a very elegant party . . . ​with champagne, caviar and paté de foie [to the audience, with an air of contempt] (paté de foie means goose liver, in case you ­don’t know). [Sways back and forth, looking straight at Bola and away to the side of the frame.] Oh, when the bubbly started to have an effect, [mock sensual tone] the heat was on . . . ​and ­people started to take off their clothes. A closeted producer was ­there [sneering] and he started dancing with this incredibly hot ­woman. [Lowers voice] He was ­really into it, dancing cheek to cheek, you know, and when the producer asked the beautiful damsel what her name was, the damsel replied: [exaggerates masculine baritone] “My name is Jorge.” [Chiding] Well, you had it coming! Happens if you ­don’t know where ­you’re headed! [Chuckling] Jorge, Georgie, it’s the same ­thing, baby. . . . ​ [Feigning surprise, as she moves on to the next piece of gossip] Ball, what! No Ball, swear, or I ­won’t believe you!72 The over-­the-­top, highly theatrical brutality is very similar to that of drag queen discourse, which is scathing in its directness. Madame Chencha makes fun of all the characters, not of queer ­people specifically, and not of anybody as targeted, disgusting subjects. Madame Chencha had her pet peeves, but it was certain be­hav­iors, not entire groups, that set her off. Silva did not mince words as Madame Chencha when she felt p ­ eople ­were exploiting a situation for their personal gain. The queer subjects she singles out in her comedy are primarily ­those who parade around their normative life for all to see, not hesitating to castigate ­others left and right, to then proceed to engage in so-­called illicit be­hav­ior out of the public eye while spared from the judgment and punishment they dispense. Slavoj Žižek has addressed instances of the Lacanian real’s eruption into the social fabric. Silva, as master of voice’s symbolic power, contained for her listeners and viewers what he calls an “irreducible kernel of jouissance that resists all symbolization.”73 Her extraordinary success as a singer had to do with the “something” akin to the Freudian Das Ding, the “­thing,” which we can playfully link to the cosa (­thing) that all g­ reat soneros have. Recall Silva’s song, “Yo tengo una cosa” (I have a t­ hing), which, in its 1960s recording, acquired directly autobiographical qualities relating her to this unsettling, cultural ­thing, and recall also her memorable recording of “Alcapurria” (Fritter) 60  Chapter 1

from Songs My M ­ other Never Taught Me, in which she reminded listeners that “­there is a very flavorful ­thing in Puerto Rico, what is it?” (En Puerto Rico hay una cosa muy sabrosa, ¿qué será?) It’s not known if the monologues w ­ ere improvised on the spot or if she created scripts or sketches before ­going on the air. More likely than not, they ­were not completely extemporaneous. Silva’s makeup and gestures clearly owe much to her loca figuration as it had been established in Songs My ­Mother Never Taught Me; instead of the working-­class comadre that she had visually represented in her first incarnations, Silva’s makeup is gaudy, exaggerated, and flamboyant. Figures 1.10–1.12 show Silva performing the monologue just quoted. Estrellas, a celebrity pulp publication, reprinted the following monologue, “Tira y Tápate, by Chencha,” in a commemorative issue published upon her death. This shows the difference between the 1970s Chencha and her incarnation in the original “Tira y tápate” columns. Like the performed monologue, above, it is exemplary of her engagement with queer subject m ­ atter: —­ Vuélveme y cuéntame qué es lo que hay en el ambiente. —­ ¿Que hay una actriz que está muy enamorada de un estilista?, por cierto muy bueno y polifacético. —­ Bueno, pero en este negocio de “Show Business” hay cosas que parecen increíbles, pero no lo son y ésta es una de ellas. —­ Sí, bola, yo doy fe, conozco a los dos . . . ​ —­ ¿Quién te lo dijo bola? No me metas paquetes, bola, que después soy yo la que quedo mal. —­ ¿Que el galán no sabía de una discoteca donde ellos bailaban con ellos, y ellas bailaban con ellas? —­ ¡y bola, yo no entiendo eso! Vuelve, vuelve y explica eso más. —­ Déjalo ahí, porque yo no quiero causar problemas, porque si causo problemas mejor me callo. —­ Pero de verdad que él va ahí con todo y cámara . . . ​ —­ ¡Ay “visne,” esta bola me va a buscar cada lío! Mira bola, hazme el f­ avor de no decir cosas que no puedas probar, que nos pueden demandar. —­ Okay, Ball, tell me what’s happening in show biz. —­ So an actress is madly in love with a stylist (by the way, he’s very good and multitalented). —­ Well, as you know, in this business of show business lots of ­things happen that seem incredible, but they ­aren’t, and this is an example. Getting Off . . . the Nation  61

figures 1.10, 1.11, 1.12 ​Myrta Silva performing as Madame Chencha on Puerto Rican tele­vi­sion, Channel 11, early 1970s. She talked into a crystal ball called Bola. The staging recalls the white ­table ritual of espiritismo.

—­ Yes, Ball, I give you my word, I know both of them. —­ Ball, who told you that? ­Don’t lie to me, Ball, ­because I’m the one who ­will get blasted. —­ That our Romeo can always be seen at a disco where guys dance with guys and gals with gals? Ball, I ­don’t understand this! C’mon, c’mon, explain this a ­little more. —­ Well, on second thought, let’s leave it ­there, ­because I ­don’t want to create any prob­lems. Better to shut up. —­ ­Really? He ­really goes ­there and brings his camera? —­ Blessed Virgin Mary, this ball is gonna get me into trou­ble! Look Ball, ­don’t bring up ­things you ­can’t prove, ­because ­we’ll get slapped with a lawsuit. To my knowledge, no lawsuit was ever brought against Silva, but what was exacted was a steady proliferation of terrifying crank calls and anonymous letters. Silva had regularly mentioned t­hese while she worked as a columnist for Bohemia libre puertorriqueña, in her first incarnation as Chencha. She exhibited righ­teous ire and on occasion challenged the author or perpetra­ tor to identify himself or herself publicly, so the injurious speech could be adjudicated, mainly in the court of public opinion that journalism faintly still represented. In the 1970s, Silva continued to receive anonymous letters and threats. ­There was no longer a call on her part to match this hateful speech with its origin. Instead, Silva created Madame Chencha and her sidekick, Bola. No one could say who Silva referred to, even though many p ­ eople ­were convinced that they knew the identities of the accused in Silva’s discourse as Chencha. The shared nothing or constitutive emptiness of the monologue kept viewers hooked. I met Bola while interviewing Silva’s niece, Awilda Silva. I could not believe that I was seeing and touching the famed ball of my early childhood. Amazed, I realized it was simply a round vase turned upside down, catapulted into the sublime when amplified by the special effects available to tv at the time, when gazed at via much smaller screens than t­ hose available t­ oday. Transparent and very ordinary, Bola was completely clear, completely empty. It had been, once, a full emptiness endowed with an aphonic voice, like Silva’s self-­figuration in “Nada,” her sexuality in guaracha interpretations, and the conventional love of her boleros; like Chencha’s supposedly revealing gait, “Tira y tápate” ’s jabs, and the ventriloquized drag queen’s speech in Songs My ­Mother Never Taught Me.

Getting Off . . . the Nation  63

Chencha mouthed ordinary discourse, reflecting back the obsession with so-­called privacy and the morbid curiosity for what society’s preferred scapegoats of the day did in their everyday life. Associates and friends of Silva’s told me that she had a set number of stock monologues that varied ­little and that she never mentioned ­people by name. In their opinion, Silva was not ­really talking about anybody in par­tic­u­lar, and she made t­ hings up for laughs.74 It is true that the anecdotes resemble the ones mobilized in her recording of her theme song “Tira y tápate,” from the lp Myrta Silva presenta: Una hora contigo (Myrta Silva pres­ents “An Hour with You”), figures of a generalized critique of sexual hy­poc­risy in celebrity-­driven culture and frenzied consumerism. Without discounting the problematic aspects of Silva’s per­for­mance as Chencha, Silva always acted with an ethics in mind, what we might call a cynical ethics, fusing Foucault and Lacan.75 Silva’s 1960s columns inserted themselves in a larger commentary about musical life in Puerto Rico and wherever Puerto Rican artists or fans w ­ ere. They ­were performative, but in a dialogical way, continuing the initial dialogism of “Nada.” Silva often responded to fans’ queries and shared information about artist per­for­mances that she received in the mail or by phone. She talked about ­actual phone calls and visits from a dizzying array of artists, many of whom ­were very famous. Silva’s intonation, her dif­fer­ent tones, even her physical gestures jump off the page. Her 1970s re-­creation of Chencha, by contrast, exists in a closed, claustrophobic discursive world, one could say severed from the artistic persona of Myrta. I’m not proposing that Silva should have continued to sing beyond her interest so her Myrta persona could prevail. The public demanded the old Silva, the Silva of the past, particularly tied to “Nada” and other Rafael Hernández songs, in tune with the standard narrative of Puerto Rican m ­ usic emphasizing male greatness and calling on w ­ omen as surrogates, at best. What if Silva had been able to host a live m ­ usic show in the 1970s? Who knows what Madame Chencha would have been like, and the opportunity rising artists would have had? An award-­winning variety show, like Silva had just achieved in New York, was unthinkable in 1970s Puerto Rico b ­ ecause the entertainment industry was driven insanely to profit, capitalized as a side arm of other financial ventures, attracted to foreign pop stars more than Puerto Ricans ­because of the need to entertain tourists, and dangerously in alliance with the ever more repressive government bent on dividing artists into ideological camps. Thus, the drama of Madame Chencha goes far deeper than ­imagined.

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Some viewers remember the general tone of Silva’s monologues and are offended but ignore other aspects of the skits. The final iteration of the Chencha persona borrows heavi­ly from the ritualistic practice known as espiri­ tismo (spiritism) and its mesa blanca (white t­ able), gesturing to the occult and proscribed religious practices of the same m ­ iddle and upper classes that condemned Silva for her vulgarity. ­These subjects, one can surmise, might have felt exposed by Silva’s skits in ways that they could not acknowledge to themselves or to the public. Th ­ ere are moments when Silva toes the line between effective sendup and cheap commercial hook, of course, but her positioning is more complex, embedded in what was allowable or pos­si­ble. Silva had to run her shows through censors for years; a generalized climate of censorship and outright repression abounded. With this in mind, some of the key birthing ele­ments of this new character, Madame Chencha, become more clear. Social repression and shaming went hand in hand with lifting the bar of discourse and producing the generalized phenomenon of scapegoating.76 One route to understanding the last Chencha appearances in Silva’s ­career, and the perturbing fact that she is remembered only as Madame Chencha and as the performer of certain Rafael Hernández’s songs (“Nada,” “Esos no son de aquí,” “Buchipluma no ma”), is the ascendancy of what Jean Baudrillard called “the desert of the real,” a phenomenon actualized by the dominance of mass media and its par­tic­u­lar code producing hyperreality. The cheating producer, the duped wife, the closeted homosexual, Madame Chencha, are all characters of the hyperreal.77 Just as when Silva dissolved the presumptive separation between the listener and the singer in so many memorable per­ for­mances, she dissolved the barrier between viewers and Madame Chencha, exposing every­one’s partaking in the simulation of the real. The last Silva, of the 1970s, dabbled ­here and ­there as an artist, without the heady drive of her decades-­long ­career. She had occupied vari­ous laborious roles in her shows: She was producer, host, bandleader, singer, and comedian. She was exhausted. She devoted time to charity events and considered long-­term proj­ects for the care of el­derly artists and the establishment of fellowships for young artists from disadvantaged backgrounds, with whom she identified the most. Her lens continued to be art, but as Puerto Rico was fast becoming a hyperreality, Chencha became a simulation.78 Silva performed “Camina como Chencha” (Chencha’s Gait) in a rare 1973 live concert in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. She once again altered the lyr­ics of the song,

Getting Off . . . the Nation  65

enacting yet another layer of readings.79 Announcing her song, Silva says, “I’m ­going to sing the song that made me the most infamous in the hemisphere —­ I mean, famous —­ ladies and gentlemen, for all of you, ‘She Walks Like Chencha’!” ­Later, she improvises: “Well, e­ very one has a right to walk however they damn like. . . . ​In this day and age, every­one is ­doing the ‘Chencha.’ ” This rendition of “Chencha’s Gait” expresses an unmistakable defense of sexual freedom. The precious recording contains some segments of banter between Silva and her audience, much like the ones simulated in her original tele­vi­sion show. At one point, Silva notices a ­couple of men who appear to be embracing or engaged in romantic or sexual affection. Silva quips, “What’s that kid d ­ oing on the other guy’s head? Hey, we all know Mayagüez has a queer reputation. . . . ​Get down, get down, get down from ­there. . . . ​Well look, if you like the position and he goes for it, well then, may you live happily ever ­after . . . ​celebrate!”80 Silva came to identify with her sinthome, a late, Lacanian reformulation of the more traditional idea of the symptom, when it’s no longer culturally relevant or intellectually sensible to decode any message. Th ­ ere are vari­ous manifestations of this sinthome: her devotion to her ­mother, which from being a mask of normalcy to protect her from the accusations encircling her undisclosed (but not closeted) personal life took on an intense life of its own; her creation of a marriage to David Silva, the Mexican actor, which according to testimonies of friends never happened (for what cause we do not know, possibly as a cover, initially at least) and of a pregnancy with him, which apparently also never happened; the problematic jouissance of her ­later years as she became more virulent as Madame Chencha, even endangering her life as she received violent threats in her tv offices; and, fi­nally, a more benign jouissance in her portrayal of her bolero songs as her ­children (“My songs are like my ­children, and I ­don’t create quarrels between my ­children”).81 In the sinthome, Silva returned to the nothing. She had created Myrta at a very early age (practically the very beginning of her ­career). Silva resolutely refused to signify anything other than this figure. She created another figure, Chencha, as a secondary character, but it exceeded her control and altered significantly Myrta’s artistic trajectory. In part thanks to Chencha’s success, collective memory has occluded Myrta. My reconstruction of Silva’s brilliant ­career aims at a reparation for this forgetting. My analy­ sis of voice as a Lacanian part-­object aims to restore the performative power Silva commanded as Myrta and Chencha, and demonstrate how both of her memorable creations manifest a thinking voice.

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TWO

SO WHAT IF SHE’S BLACK? Afro–­Puerto Rican musicians routinely entertained white-­skinned Puerto Ricans and Americans in venues they ­were barred from as patrons in the first de­cades of the twentieth ­century. A female lead singer, however, was quite out of the ordinary, even this segregated ordinary. The Puerto Rican twentieth-­ century icon Ruth Fernández, like Myrta Silva, was a teenager when she began her ­career in live radio broadcasts of the early 1930s and as lead for Mingo and His Whoopee Kids. When she debuted in the posh Escambrón Beach Club in 1937 and started recording for rca Victor, she was marketed as an au­then­tic black voice, even characterized as a blues singer to translate her singing to the many Americans who frequented the club.1 Fernández entered the star orbit of the ­music establishment as an exception: the first female lead of any orchestra in Puerto Rico, and also the first black star body in Puerto Rican culture. Regarding her early start with Mingo and His Whoopee Kids, Puerto Rico’s most successful band from the 1930s to the early 1950s, Fernández recounted, “At first, the band members ­didn’t want me. They told Mingo: she’s black. She’s not pretty. But Mingo said: I’m not looking for a bombshell. . . . ​I need a singer who can come to this band with the class that this band is known for.”2 The facts of her gender and race do not tell the w ­ hole story. Considering the events happening at the time —­ three de­cades of U.S. colonialism with its mixed messages regarding the racial standing of colonial subjects, massive workers’ demonstrations, endemic poverty, and routine repression culminating in the 1937 Ponce Massacre, right in her hometown —­ it’s safe to say that Fernández accrued meaning ­because she became aligned with the evental shift from Spanish to U.S. colony in the context of the world wars, and was instrumental in the corresponding transition of racial regimes and how they ­were apprehended through ­music.

While Fernández was a pop m ­ usic singer, she possessed a voice of ­great volume and color, was naturally virtuosic, and, although not trained, reflected a preference for classically inflected singing that she prob­ably learned or was steered to in school. Fernández attended elementary school in the very first de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury. Thus she was schooled squarely in the framework of empire’s civilizing mission. In this colonial context, her voice opened a gap in the available symbolics of ­music. This gap seemed to be filled with meaning from her very first appearances, but, in truth, it remained suspended as precisely that, a gap. Aside from the strangeness of refinement in pop m ­ usic, a steely cool the singer manifested from early on, listeners belonging to multiple publics regarded Fernández’s voice as masculine, at a disjuncture or dissonance with her body. Fernández narrated how, when she was singing with Los Hijos del Arte (Art’s offspring) on the radio, circa 1935, Domingo Colón, bandleader of Mingo and His Whoopee Kids, heard her on the street and asked, “Who’s that? Is it a young man? Is it a ­woman?”3 The newly hybrid colonial society naturalized her deep voice with its mighty volume as one appropriate for a black w ­ oman, establishing an insidious connection between vocal register, race, and beauty. Words like “dramatic,” “grave,” and “strong,” which Fernández and ­others used to describe her vocal appeal, functioned as code for bodies and sounds that ­were admitted into performative spaces in vexed ways. The code was not only of the commonsense variety; it found expression in high, musically literate culture too. The renowned Catalan cellist Pau (Pablo) Casals told Fernández that her voice reminded him of his cello, an anecdote she proudly recalled.4 According to the Cuban critic and esteemed ­music collector Cristóbal Díaz-­Ayala, Armando Oréfiche, the g­ reat Cuban bandleader, pianist, and composer of the 1940s also referred to Fernández’s voice as a “violoncello.”5 An American, Glen Sauls, heard Fernández sing on the rec­ord Ñáñigo, reportedly called her “Lady Baritone,” and invited her to join the Met roster of singers on behalf of Rudolf Bing (the Metropolitan Opera House general man­ag­er from 1950 to 1972).6 In interviews, Fernández gave her vocal difference as the reason for her success, studiously deflecting attention away from her musicianship or stage presence: “Tenía una voz grave, distinta” (I had a deep, dif­fer­ent voice).7 The late Marvette Pérez, then Latino history and culture curator at the National Museum of American History, conducted an extensive, groundbreaking oral history of Fernández in which she spoke of her voice as “a rare gift” and recalled how, when she began singing, ­people affirmed that “she resembled 68  Chapter 2

a man.” Contralto voices ­were unrecognizable in the pop milieu as female voices; society did not have a name for them: “I had such a deep voice. L ­ ater I 8 was told I was a contralto.” It seems unlikely that Fernández was simply mouthing racist descriptions she heard. Rather, in her interviews she was performing and si­mul­ta­neously reenacting a par­tic­u­lar voice, one she adjusted and refined as her ­career unfolded, with the clear intention of intervening in Puerto Rico’s cultural and po­liti­cal decolonization across the twentieth c­ entury. Fernández’s understanding of the inescapable consequences of racially defined national ­music in early colonial life, and her decision to explic­itly represent race for elites as Puerto Rico “progressed” to liberal modernity, distinguish her from the plethora of brilliant black ­women singers of the Greater Ca­rib­bean in the short twentieth c­ entury.9 ­Today, her ­career provides a valuable launching pad to complicate standard accounts of the ­careers and vocal quandaries of black ­women singers in the Ca­rib­bean and Latin Amer­i­ca.10 This chapter is structured around instances of sonic interpellation at key moments of Fernández’s musical ­career, which are explic­itly articulated around race and led to Fernández’s l­ater, diva cry: “So what if I’m black?” The eulogies delivered during three official days of mourning upon her passing in early 2012, at age ninety-­two, continued the baffling and sometimes infuriating lack of depth in repeated paeans mostly limited to superficial biographical sketches heavi­ly influenced by the artist’s own account of her life. Notwithstanding the large number of primary documents, appreciations, and interviews extant in the archive, ­there are, to my knowledge, no critical considerations of Fernández’s large musical output and her role in the intersection of culture and politics, so illustrative of other such figures in the Latin American constellation of the twentieth ­century.11 One of the most successful Puerto Rican artists from the 1940s to the 1960s, Fernández was a h ­ ouse­hold name for de­cades in Puerto Rican homes on the island and in the United States, as well as famous throughout Latin Amer­i­ca (especially in Cuba and Mexico, the two major musical markets of the time). Her ­career began in 1930s Puerto Rico, in radio and in local, live venues; in the 1940s she scored a huge triumph in the Cuban operetta Cecilia Valdés (recorded 1948); in the 1950s she hosted radio shows in Puerto Rico (some of which featured a gossip slant, such as La chismosa [The gossip queen] and ¿Te enteraste? [Did you know that?]). Starting in the 1960s, by then installed as a symbol of Puerto Rico’s modernity and ­adopted by the government as its official cultural ambassador, she shifted t­ oward pedagogical tele­vi­sion. She hosted So What If She’s Black?  69

programs with didactic names like Almorzando con Ruth Fernández (Lunchtime with Ruth Fernández, wkbm), Del brazo con Ruth Fernández (Guided by Ruth Fernández, wkaq), and Cantemos con Ruth Fernández (Let’s sing with Ruth Fernández, wipr).12 She was also featured in the musical interludes of the movies Caña brava (Indomitable sugar cane) and Romance en Puerto Rico (A romance in Puerto Rico), and appeared in an American cult film, Fiend of Dope Island, in a nonsinging, nonspeaking role as Tula, a “tropical” bartender. Her cinematic visuality corresponded to the imaginary of the tropical island inhabitant; it clashed with the image she painstakingly developed for her artistic persona, as we ­shall see. Adding to her mystique, Fernández became revered by the thousands of Puerto Ricans who emigrated to New York and other U.S. cities from the 1950s on. She became an avuncular figure who addressed mi­grant affective wounds of deep loss and painful missing through ­music, earning the moniker of Titi Ruth (Auntie Ruth; she remained childless and repeatedly invoked her numerous, adoptive sobrinos [nephews and nieces]).13 She performed live in well-­established venues for Latino audiences in the city, like the Teatro Hispano, Teatro Puerto Rico, and Car­ne­gie Hall, as well as local Latino clubs. She toured U.S. universities. She participated in a historic 1965 Metropolitan Opera House concert at the Lewisohn Stadium. And she was on tv in the tri-­state area with wnju’s The Ruth Fernández Show, taped partially in Puerto Rico and rebroadcast in the States. In the 1980s and 1990s, her lps w ­ ere reissued as cds sold in Puerto Rican and New York City stores u ­ nder the rubrics Música del ayer (Yesterdays’ ­music) or Puerto Rico. Now, as with so many artists of the past, she enjoys an afterlife on YouTube, iTunes (variously shelved ­under Latino and World), and Spotify. ­After her most estimable recording and performing period, dating from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, Fernández turned to an intense symbolization of “local color” at the ser­vice of the Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party (Partido Popu­lar Democrático, ppd). She lived a celebrity life, one she publicly presented as both moral and pedagogical. Her celebrity life culminated in her becoming a professional politician in 1972, past her personal, musical heyday but entirely as a consequence of national m ­ usic’s potential for po­liti­cal marketing. Promoting herself as “the singing senator” and as “La Negra de Ponce” (the black ­woman from Ponce), she served as senator at large for eight years and ­later became a special aide for cultural affairs to the governor of Puerto Rico from 1985 to 1993. Without a doubt, Fernández’s willingness to represent racial uplift through m ­ usic, her fit with the populist narrative of the ppd, and 70  Chapter 2

a societal investment in classical m ­ usic as the mea­sure of civilization and musical education (which Fernández’s voice clearly substantiated, since to the “uneducated” ears of colonial subjects, she did sound like a virtuosic contralto rather than a pop singer), combined to make her the ppd’s media darling for several de­cades. Standard interpretations of Fernández’s ­career thus far lack insight into the complexity of Fernández’s musical personality. She becomes, simply, a heroic figure within a m ­ iddle-­class ethos, espoused by a heavi­ly white and light-­ skinned, elite group and funneled to the rest of the population via the state’s cultural arm. Fernández’s repetition of her racial tale appeals to certain social sectors in Puerto Rico up to this day, indicating the existence of a “policy of the ostrich” in which race is the pure signifier passed along the intersubjective chain without, however, becoming a letter (see chapter 1).14 Recalling the title of a groundbreaking Puerto Rican book on race, Isabelo Zenón Cruz’s Narciso descubre su trasero (Narcissus discovers his derriere), as when the ostrich’s head is buried in its backside so as not to see, race becomes a construct of benevolence whose pernicious role in the symbolic chain is not exposed; its logic of segregation ranging from condescension to brutal exclusion and degradation are disguised. In this light, it’s impor­tant to reconsider Fernández’s influential self-­narrative, one she started telling once she became preoccupied with cementing her place in posterity as the twentieth ­century inched ­toward a close. The travails of her virtuosic voice can be read as the actualization of an aspirational desire to belong to the sphere of ­those considered educated, ­those who presumably safeguarded the collective’s highest values (a desire that resonates with the Spanish phrase tener una voz educada, possessing a trained voice). Legend has it Fernández would have preferred to sing jazz or opera. ­Whether this myth is true or not, t­here is certainly a distinct quality to this voice, an uneasy residing in Latin American pop m ­ usic ­because of its operatic sound (which was not the norm in the sabor [soul] and sentimiento [feeling] genres that Fernández favored).15 This did not stem from her timbre as an immanent fact. She chose to interpret pop ­music ­after what was thought of as highbrow singing. It ­didn’t hurt that Fernández had a passionate investment in fashion since she was young and became known for her legendary collection of designer dresses. She knew that voice was not just heard; it was as much “seen” in per­for­mance. She cannily employed the scopic register to influence collective listening. The Slovenian thinker Mladen Dolar wrote, in A Voice and Nothing More, “We are social beings by the voice and through the voice: it seems that the So What If She’s Black?  71

voice stands at the axis of our social bonds, and that voices are the very texture of the social, as well as the intimate kernel of subjectivity.”16 Fernández’s “intimate kernel of subjectivity” manifested in voice is extremely hard to decipher, while the form she gave to the social via voice is comparatively easier to piece together. Her personal reserve ran deep, despite her constant display. She tunes us into another variant of overexamination of the w ­ oman singer, one whose key is race. Constantly scrutinized visually and vocally, she constructed a persona, literally a glittering surface to match the won­der her voice provoked. Like other w ­ omen singers thrust into crucibles of voice, Fernández gave form to the extimate. As I discussed in chapter 1, Jacques Lacan theorized the extimate as the point of intermediacy and undecidability, resting just at the interior-­ exterior juncture of individual and social subjectivity. Fernández’s extimacy, though, is of a decidedly dif­fer­ent nature than Myrta Silva’s. The Puerto Rican crucible Fernández embodied concerned the shape of its pop singing as it began to inhabit the world as a form of ambassadorship, breaking out of the insularity enforced by U.S. military rule. The crucible responds to changes in the colonial structure and world transformations regarding strug­gles for self-­ determination and freedom. Fernández’s own narratives about her ­career can be regarded as both true and untrue, which is to say they are performative. Seen retrospectively, her strategies w ­ ere hugely successful as both a shield for the singer and an active intervention into culture and politics.

THE SENSORIUM OF RACISM Fernández’s first hit was an “Afro” song, “Y tu abuela onde etá.” Fortunato Vizcarrondo wrote the poem in the late-1930s context of Ca­rib­bean avant-­ garde poetry, specifically poesía negrista or afroantillana (Afro-­Antillean poetry). In this literary movement, prominent in the 1930s and 1940s across the Spanish-­speaking Ca­rib­bean, mostly white or light-­skinned writers rendered “black speech” as inherently rhythmic and sonorous, assigning black bodies an immanent relationship with pure sonority. This poetry claimed to represent the orality and sound of the newfound (literarily speaking) black subject. Domingo Colón (bandleader, as mentioned, of Mingo and His Whoopee Kids; the En­glish name of the group should not go unnoticed) set the poem to ­music with Fernández in mind. This is no small detail since the poem’s speaker is masculine, resonating with his initial confusion as to w ­ hether Fernández’s voice was masculine. Colón explic­itly linked Fernández’s voice to black sound, using the acoustic coordinates supplied by Afro-­Caribbean 72  Chapter 2

poetry to implant this identification. Following Freud’s treatment of identification, its misfires enhance its capacity to perform symbolic work. In the societal view, Fernández’s gender made her contralto voice unnatural, and her race made it black, joining two signs to embody a perpetual dissonance and thus create a very productive series of misfires.17 Released in 1941 by rca Victor, “Y tu abuela onde etá” is a slow-­tempo tango-­congo with an ostinato rhythm. Like the first version of “Camina como Chencha” examined in chapter 1, it evoked what Robin Moore has described as a “generic primitivism.”18 It is a per­for­mance of blackness following how elites and pop­u­lar sectors ­were codifying racial alterity through lit­er­a­ture. As one of the first sound reproductions of this codification, it is a prime example of an early “acousmatic blackness.”19 During the 1930s, an entire polemic around the appropriateness of including blackness as intrinsic to the Puerto Rican national character raged, especially around the publication of poet Luis Palés Matos’s so-­called black poems, collected in the pivotal Tun tun de pasa y grifería (1937). Closer to musical debates, the intellectual Tomás Blanco published “Elogio de la plena” (In praise of plena) in 1935, making a case for plena’s inclusion in the canon of national ­music as a “miscegenating genre.” Setting needle to groove, we hear the singer attempting to embody the sonic blackness that the poem’s linguistic apprehension of the black speaking subject proposes: Ayé me dijite negra Y hoy te boy a contejtá: Mi mai se sienta en la sala. ¿Y tu agüela, aonde ejtá? Yesterday, you said I was black ­Today, I’m ­going to respond to you My ­mother sits in the parlor And your grand­mother? Where is she? In order to epitomize this black-­black interlocution, as written by a white-­ skinned poet, Fernández employs her deep register, laughter, and conversational musical phrasing such as sung whispering and sung questioning. In this early recording, she seeks to match societal expectations about the comical nature of such conversations, yet also manages to introduce a supplement (in the Derridean sense). The vaguely erotic interpellation Fernández mixes in with phrases such as “mi bien” (my sweet) and sonorous ele­ments such as So What If She’s Black?  73

figure 2.1 ​Ruth Fernández as lead of Mingo and His Whoopee Kids, circa 1935. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Puerto Rico.

humming, snickering, and so forth key us to the ambivalent meaning of this not-­quite-­maternal figure. She inhabits a masculine space of interlocution, fronting an all-­male band yet becoming permanently suspended as not quite feminine. Fernández bridged the discourse belittling Afro–­Puerto Ricans, on the one hand, and, on the other, the discourse investing m ­ usic per­for­mance with a growing stature as a professional, artistic pursuit, aligned with class taste. The song uncannily mirrors the self-­narrative Fernández crafted much ­later. The question befuddles the critic: Did Fernández tailor her narrative to echo her first hit, or does the late 1930s–­early 1940s per­for­mance of “Y tu abuela onde etá” prefigure her life narrative? To this day, the original recording sounds like a riddle, a wonderful per­for­mance of ironic interlocution in a purely sonorous medium. Decidedly, the distinguishing ele­ment of the first recording is sabor, that elusive quality poorly translated into En­glish as swing, timing, or soul. Figure 2.1 is a very early photo­graph, exact date unknown, but around the same time of this early hit, which had been performed before it was recorded 74  Chapter 2

in 1941. The first photos of Ruth Fernández may recall Walter Benjamin’s “­Little History of Photography” in that they have aura, capturing a time in which subjects ­were simply not used to the camera, when posing required effort and subjects exhibited a high degree of self-­consciousness. In other portraits of this time, Fernández donned primitivistic garb to suggest exotic blackness; in one, she held her head with her right hand in a coded erotic stance of availability. Both the respectable photo of the orchestra lead and the sexualized photo represent the singer as available, racialized “other.” The first stance, however, had much more to do with Fernández’s artistic temperament. She grew up surrounded by a cosmopolitan and hybrid musical culture, in the southern city of Ponce, Puerto Rico; liked all kinds of m ­ usic; and was accustomed to performing, listening to, and discussing m ­ usic in her hometown. Fernández belonged to a working black ­middle class and was expected to pursue a respectable ­career. As a young artist, she was attracted to bohemia but was barred from that institution ­because of its associations with lewd be­hav­ior, drinking, sexual license, and loss of ­woman’s honor. The photo as material object relies on the visual, while recordings, obviously, stress the aural. Yet both visual and aural belong to the sensorium of racism. ­These archival objects are interdependent; sound and gaze, visuality and aurality work together in the perceiving subject’s sensorium. Fernández’s first photos, t­ oday, compel us to the gaze, but we c­ an’t obliterate the sound they ­were associated with, being portraits of a well-­known, already iconic singer. As I have been working for some time with Fernández’s archive, looking at early photos I c­ an’t help but reflect on her self-­descriptions as the product of successful imperialism (the Spanish) as opposed to presumptively unsuccessful imperialism (the American); her codification of this success around erotics (describing her own lineage in terms of racial intermingling and the Spaniard’s taste for black w ­ omen); and how l­ater in life she spoke of seeing her mixed Eu­ro­pean and African heritage in her own image.20 ­These are all puzzling —­ and, at points, troubling —­ statements. In their looking back at us, their barely legible but pres­ent refusal, ­these early objects clearly reject this narrative.21 Despite being portraits of a raced, colonial, and clearly subordinate subject, with a compulsory artistic pose, t­ here is inscrutability and a haunting mystery to Fernández’s gaze back at the camera in this earliest period. We can divine ele­ments of what the Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant labeled “forced poetics”: “I define forced or constrained poetics as any collective yearning for expression that, when it manifests itself, is negated at the same time b ­ ecause So What If She’s Black?  75

of the deficiency that stifles it, not at the level of desire, which never ceases, but at the level of expression, which is never realized.”22 This “expression that is never realized” might serve as an entry point to consider Fernández’s ­career, as a production of a “forced poetics” at the vis­i­ble level and an unrecorded but pres­ent other poetics (which w ­ ere closely related to cir­cuits of blackness that did manage to survive out of the purview of the totalizing, imperial gaze). Significantly, the flip side of the 78 recording of “Y tu abuela onde etá” (a soon-­ to-­become iconic song), is a slow-­tempo recording about self-­determination, “Lamento de un boricua” (A Puerto Rican’s lament). The speaker calls for Puerto Rican statehood as the just outcome of the colonial situation and secondarily for in­de­pen­dence as the only other dignified outcome should statehood be denied: Ay, mi patria llora Ay, mi patria gime Y solo pide su estadidad O si no, pide su libertad Borinquen mía, qué triste estás Por qué no hablas con claridad Es ya la hora de cantar Nuestra canción de estadidad My country is weeping My country is moaning It just wants its statehood If not, it demands its freedom My Puerto Rico, you are so sad Why ­don’t you speak with clarity It’s time to sing Our statehood song We cannot ascribe the song’s politics to Fernández, who at this time was working for the orchestra and prob­ably had no say in its repertoire. Nevertheless, it is striking to consider the young ­woman mouthing lyr­ics that she would not have been caught dead singing l­ater in life, once her beloved Luis Muñoz Marín declared a new status formulation for Puerto Rico, the Estado Libre Asociado (ela, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico). This material object, the 78 rec­ord with the two tracks, “Y tu abuela onde etá” and “Lamento de un 76  Chapter 2

boricua,” testifies to the intersection of two underdeveloped discourses about Puerto Ricanness in 1941. First, the imperial idea that all Puerto Ricans are racially suspect or, put in more palatable, liberal terms, belong to the “tree with three roots” and as such are formally the same, if not equal.23 The second discourse, that of self-­determination, would remain a bone of contention as the third alternative of the ela became hegemonic upon the rise of the ppd in 1952, and neither statehood nor in­de­pen­dence ­were achieved. Both discourses —­ the new racial discourse of the 1930s and the demand for po­ liti­cal equality —­ are anticolonial. Fernández emerges, paradoxically, as a symbol of both. Fernández sang “Y tu abuela onde etá” at the Teatro Latino of New York in 1941, with other early hits: the comical “La borrachita” [The l­ittle drunk] by Rafael Hernández and the Agustín Lara bolero standard “Piénsalo bien” [Think hard about it]. She gave this 1941 per­for­mance as the origin of her enduring epithet: “The hosts, Arturo Córdova and Héctor del Villar, observed how ­people wept with nostalgia and they came up with ‘Puerto Rico’s Singing Soul’ ” (El alma de Puerto Rico hecha canción).24 Fernández accrued, as is customary for ­women pop singers of her stature, certain titles. ­These ­were as much honorific as they ­were selling slogans to aid the ­music industry in publicizing the singer as somehow being equal to her land of origin and therefore especially worthy. Domingo Colón’s original design, of enlisting Fernández ­because she supplied the “class” that the orchestra presumably lacked, became refracted and displayed into an ever-­widening arena composed of multiple publics. Figure 2.2 is a well-­known ­album cover from the early 1950s neatly illustrating this changed positioning. Fernández appears in her characteristic, mature pose, quite dif­fer­ent from that of the young w ­ oman we saw in figure 2.1. Arms outstretched as if effortlessly sing­ ing a musical note, she is dressed in a designer gown with a splendid cape and sparkling earrings (possibly similar to when, in her account, she borrowed a splendid outfit to cross color lines in a first-­class ­hotel in the late 1930s, an anecdote I discuss below). The background features a series of snapshots of Puerto Rican life. Looking closely, we see scenes from the beach and the countryside, images of leisure time. Definitely, the cover reflects the construction of Puerto Rican singing as intimately linked to both nostalgia and tourism, presenting a revised sensorium where visuality and aurality interlock powerfully. The w ­ hole is anchored in a reinterpreted racial regime authored by the ppd to buttress the cultural arm of the three-­pronged strategy Governor Luis Muñoz Marín devised for Puerto Rico during the first de­cade of the ela, So What If She’s Black?  77

figure 2.2 ​Album cover, Ruth Fernández, El alma de Puerto Rico hecha canción canta sus canciones favoritas, Marvela lp-58, 1960?.

which was baptized as Operation Serenity.25 Fernández assumed the role of primary symbol of this revised, top-­down, mandated sensorium that shifted repre­sen­ta­tion ­toward a formal new state antiracism supplanting the prior, dominant, white supremacist model.26 In this vinyl rec­ord, tracks originally recorded about a de­cade apart, from 1941 (“Tú volverás,” “Cuando vuelvas”) to 1952 (“Sollozo,” “Luna sobre Borinquen”), as 78 rpm rec­ords are sequenced in a narrative that reflects this recali­ bration of racial politics. Th ­ ese are the artist’s rerecordings, not the original tracks remastered. The ­album consists mostly of Latin American boleros, with the occasional ballad written specifically to induce nostalgia for Puerto Rico (“Bello amanecer” [A beautiful sunrise], “Luna sobre Borinquen” [Moon over Puerto Rico], “Tonadita borincana” [A Puerto Rican tune]). The arrangements correspond to the emerging, ­middle-­class taste for so-­called semiclassical ­music, featuring muted bongos, no syncopation, orchestra strings, and sweeping brass sounds vaguely suggesting the symphonic. With its highbrow yearnings, the rise of semiclassical m ­ usic changed Fernández’s reception; it

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re­oriented her ­music ­toward a standardized listening ear (reminiscent of Theodor Adorno’s well-­known critique of the “rhythmically obedient type” in the wake of Tin Pan Alley).27 The epithet “El Alma de Puerto Rico Hecha Canción” stresses the spiritual; comes across as tacky (cursi in Spanish) to the pres­ent-­day ear; and places the icon squarely in the feminine and in the purportedly colorless realm of the soul, reformulating the original icon considerably by placing her at a remove from race and closer to gender. “Canción” immediately aligns Fernández with forms of pop ­music considered serious or high, prob­ably art and parlor songs, even though ­these ­were creations of middlebrow culture. The repertoire’s evolution is complicated; no pop artist could survive financially singing only one genre, as they had to please heterogeneous audiences. Fernández had to sing dance m ­ usic, which was coded black, if she was to make a living as a musician. Most paid work came from live singing in a variety of venues, from exclusive h ­ otels and clubs, to the private parties of the upper classes, to the fiestas patronales (open air festivals) and dances in working-­class clubs and, l­ater, the New York market created by migration. Yet this new encasing of national m ­ usic to approximate the “semiclassical” and perform as a collective values vessel permeated the totality of Fernández’s repertoire and saturated her artistic persona. It presented an icon who was black, but also elite, a true social contradiction in mid-­twentieth-­century Puerto Rico. Gender, as before, operated as bridge. However much its valence changed, gender remained a gap that was useful to the extent that it was not filled but remained as a full emptiness primarily, although not exclusively, deployed through voice. Fernández came to posit ­music as mostly pedagogical, didactic, as in the colonial pedagogy she learned as a child. Like other schoolchildren in the early twentieth ­century, she was brought up with a belief in ­music’s edifying nature. Her first contact with ­music was in school, where, she claims, ­music was “everywhere heard” and c­ hildren “learned singing.”28 It may strain credulity to believe that schools in the first de­cades of the American occupation of Puerto Rico could be so paradisiacal. Spanish was intermittently, but consistently, forbidden; the anthem and flag w ­ ere banned; t­ here was g­ reat vio­lence in the country and dire economic need. Most American schoolteachers ­were told they would be dealing with savages. Fernández gives us a clue to what “savages” meant for t­hese “practice teachers” (as they w ­ ere called): “American schoolteachers thought all Puerto Ricans ­were black.”29 Clearly

So What If She’s Black?  79

this statement only has meaning within the vicious American racism of the day and its white supremacist ethos. With the ascendancy of the ppd, this racial regime was substantially revised. Fernández’s value was enhanced, symbolically and practically, by her affiliation as a ponceña, a native of the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, with its claims to cosmopolitanism and its mixed musical heritage. She easily slotted into the rising symbolics of racial harmony signified through w ­ holesome pop­u­lar ­music ­under the aegis of classical ­music. Musically speaking, 1930s Ponce offered a fascinating mix of musical culture that was more elastic than what ­later would be termed Puerto Rican ­music. In some ways, Ponce’s musical scenario was heterogeneous in comparison to that of Puerto Rico’s cultural center, San Juan, the capital city; in other ways, Ponce created its own stratifications and was notably Eurocentric.30 In a cheesy but nonetheless revealing 1963 portrait of Fernández written by Abelardo Díaz Alfaro, author of several primary and secondary school textbooks of the ela’s nativist canon, indicatively titled “Ruth la negra, Ruth la blanca” (Black Ruth, white Ruth), the writer describes Fernández: “She is the typical, au­then­tic voice of Puerto Rico, but even more so of her unforgettable Ponce, singular and provincial. The seigniorial, storied Ponce, fierce guardian of tradition, of chivalrous customs, haughty garrison of Creoleness, impregnable citadel of autochthony. Ponce, more than a city, is a passion, a feeling, a par­tic­u­lar way of living and dreaming.”31 Fernández described how “Ponce was a very musical town. Musicians sang in private homes, in parties. P ­ eople brought serenades to other p ­ eople’s homes. Ponce was a very bohemian town.”32 Just as with “creoleness” (in Spanish, criollo, a person with Spanish parents but born in Latin Amer­i­ca, which is odd at best when referring to a black subject whose parental lineage is traced to Africa and slavery), bohemio has always been a double-­edged sword in Puerto Rican culture. “Bohemio” can mean someone who is unemployed or not disposed to work; it can be a designation of leisure time devoted to artistic activities; or it can indicate relaxed social mores. Its subject is most often privileged in some way. Fernández uses it h ­ ere to refer to the active cultural scene and the mix of musical practices happening in the city, indicating that this mix included cross-­class and cross-­race contact. Managing such contact was vital to the state’s new designs. Bohemia was also gendered, associated with lewd be­hav­ior, sexual license, and drinking and partying. ­Women artists ­were vulnerable to charges of licentiousness, and black ­women artists ­were practically assumed not to have

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any “decency.”33 Fernández, like all young ­women of her background (meaning, ­those aspiring to the m ­ iddle classes or of the m ­ iddle classes) was not allowed to simply traverse the urban space at ­will. She had to be accompanied by a chaperone wherever she went and was required to attend university and secure credentials in a suitable, feminine profession. Fernández did so, earning a degree as a normal teacher, although she never worked as anything other than a musician ­until she became a politician in the 1970s. In her mature ­career, she refigured bohemian life as society life and turned to membership, however conditioned, in the civic ladies’ society as its only black member, thus recasting the limits she had seen imposed on her as a younger ­woman into a privileged, though symbolically subordinate, existence. It is a commonplace to say that the African-­derived genres of Puerto Rican folkloric ­music ­were born in Ponce, but this glosses over the dif­fer­ent forms and reception of bomba and plena, and the difference between ­music experienced as entertainment and ­music executed as ­labor. Fernández learned the Afro–­Puerto Rican folkloric genres of bomba and plena u ­ nder the sign of a conservative and Eurocentric musical vision. In the documentary Raíces [Roots] (2001), she stated, “The bomba and plena I grew up with resembled a minuet,” emphasizing the choreographed aspects of dance and not dance’s capacity to cause bodily transport in defiance of a choreography that was intended to elevate and educate, and correct the excesses of the body.34 Silvia Álvarez Curbelo has cautioned, “To say that pop­u­lar rhythm is de-­popularized, is not the best approach. It would be better to speak of a hybrid created by Ca­rib­ bean pop­u­lar rhythms and Eu­ro­pean forms.”35 Nevertheless, it’s impossible to ignore Fernández’s characterization of the Ponce bomba and plena as slower-­ tempo ­music and aristocratic, in comparison to the other bomba and plena per­for­mances that Fernández implicitly refers to and to which she assigns a lesser status in culture. In dominant venues, pop­u­lar ­music became stratified and coded as entertainment for elites. Cross-­class and cross-­race contact in the southern city approximated Fernández’s ideal of listening and performing, limitations and all, but it’s an open question ­whether she helped implant a truly cross-­class and cross-­race experience in her ­career and ­later on as a politician. Fernández did not sing the Puerto Rican African-­derived genres that she prob­ably heard in her native Ponce during her very first years as a professional, but rather American standards and Cuban pop­u­lar ­music.36 This early training in non–­Puerto Rican pop genres proved to be an essential preparation for

So What If She’s Black?  81

the pivotal event in her c­ areer. In the late 1940s, the acclaimed Cuban composer Gonzalo Roig hired her to sing the part of Dolores Santa Cruz, a former slave, for the premiere of his operetta Cecilia Valdés. By this time, Fernández was a full-­time musician singing dance ­music and boleros in competitive markets, but she had to return to Afro-­Caribbean impersonations to fi­nally obtain standing as a soloist of international acclaim. As is well known, this operetta is considered the epic of Cuban nationality. Fernández scored a huge hit with her rendition of the tango-­congo “Po Po Po,” whose lyr­ics presume to render the vernacular Spanish of former slaves (referred to as bozal), ­after the style of Afro-­Antillean poetry. No doubt her prior, acousmatic blackness —­ the one heard in “Y tu abuela onde etá” —­ is the subtext for this new per­for­mance. Dolores Santa Cruz laments the way she has been robbed of her money by “­lawyers and rich white folks”: Po po po Po po po Po po po Po po po Aquí etá Dolore Santa Cru Aquí etá Que no tienga dinero Po po po Ni tienga pa comé Po po po Totitico lo abogao Y caballero branco Po po po Le quitaron toitico cuanto tienga Le robaron toitico su dinero A Dolore Santa Cru Dolores Santa Cruz is a tragicomic figure with no plot involvement in the operetta. She is presented strictly as a type. The most impor­tant ele­ment of “Po po po” stems from the declarative structure of Afro-­Antillean poetry, exhibiting its “linguistricks” as well as its thematic and stylistic ele­ments. Jacques Lacan coined “linguisterie” to suggest a fusing of hysteria and linguistics. ­These signifiers white writers in­ven­ted to represent something they 82  Chapter 2

thought of as black speech strongly suggest a hysterical rendition of the black subject, identified with the colonial past remembered as a “better (cultural) time.” Instead of manifesting publicly in white bodies, symptoms are transposed via writing into spectral black bodies, but they still are the white man’s symptom. Assuming the other’s speech and using it as entertainment, enlisting black performers to parade the authenticity of such absurd signifiers, is also to put black performers in the psychically stressful position of being perpetual symptom ­bearers. Lacan’s reformulation of the signified is especially useful: A signifier’s relationship is to another signifier, not to any signified. ­Here race as the signifier, heard through its collection of phonemes, spills out of Puerto Rico and meets its Cuban counterpart, soon to travel to the rest of Latin Amer­i­ca and to the United States. Similarly, Fernández’s voice stands for the portability of speech, recasting the terms of the autoaffectivity Jacques Derrida related to the voice as the stand-in for speech: Nothing of Fernández’s interiority is to be divined from her voice in t­ hese per­for­mances, or this speech, symptom of white anxiety. For ­those unfamiliar with the Spanish language, it’s necessary to point out the song’s attempts to render black dialect: “tienga” instead of “tenga,” “etá” for “está,” “toitico” for “todito,” and so forth. But perhaps the song’s most striking sonic ele­ment lies in the repetition of a nonlinguistic refrain: “po po po,” each syllable featuring a richly sonorous vowel in Spanish, the o, a favorite sound of Afro-­Antillean poetry, the same literary movement that birthed the lyr­ics and sensibility of “Y tu abuela onde etá.” It is rendered as a pure sound supposedly reminiscent of blackness, and Fernández’s contralto voice becomes welded to this construction of the black subject as “entering linguistics.” (The other side of this portrayal represented the black subject as illiterate, meaning, in this view, tragically ignorant and/or inherently comical. I’m sure Fernández did not for a second intend to pose as clownish or as a buffoon, something that would have absolutely gone against her personal and musical temperament. However, the piece surely had this effect on its mostly white or light-­skinned ­audience.) Afro-­Antillean poetry was written with per­for­mance in mind, to be executed by black diseurs and diseuses who could supposedly convey authenticity ­because, being black, they w ­ ere taken to be more proximate to the poetry (the two most famous w ­ ere the Puerto Rican Juan Boria and the Cuban Eusebia Cosme).37 Nina Eidsheim’s observations about the training of the dominant ear to perceive voices as black, and the imperative ­toward a vocal pedagogy to So What If She’s Black?  83

teach what blackness is (how it should be apprehended sonically), provides a supple, critical tool to understand that, in some instances, the aural cue is just as power­ful (and sometimes more power­ful) than the visual in the construction of blackness in m ­ usic (while acknowledging the racism of both). Ca­rib­ bean poetry is part of the Latin American sonic archive and its lyr­ics respond to phonemes imbued with meaning to condition listening beyond visuality.38 “Po po po” was released as a 78 and stood for de­cades as an instantly recognizable document of “native” blackness, neatly encapsulated in a few syllables and a three-­minute format.

ACOUSMATIC BLACKNESS Documentation of the original staging of “Po po po” is not available at this time. The National Foundation for Popu­lar Culture of Puerto Rico, fortunately, has a clip of an older Fernández, circa 1990, singing “Po po po” while dressed in character as Dolores Santa Cruz. Fernández re-­creates the original character as Cirilo Villaverde’s novel pres­ents her, as deranged. She looks to the side suspiciously, smiling and giggling like a l­ ittle girl. She sings in slow tempo, sometimes speaking the verses into the microphone, simulating a whisper. It’s likely she was repeating closely the staging she had learned for the part, which stressed the melodramatic gesticulation, the paranoid whispering, and the insane laughter. Fernández possessed a g­ reat stage presence as well as a flair for the dramatic. However, to state the obvious, the portrayal is problematic. Fernández’s other intervention in the operetta is “Tanila,” in which she sings solo backed by an operatic chorus. It’s staged and orchestrated to achieve the maximum folkloric effect of this repre­sen­ta­tion of the stock character of the Afro-­Cuban subject. Fernández’s two pieces, “Po po po” and “Tanila,” w ­ ere released in one 78 rec­ord, which became a top 39 seller. The Puerto Rican engineer Fernando Montilla, who financed the recording of Cecilia Valdés, had persuaded Gonzalo Roig to hire Fernández to sing the part. A few years ­later, Montilla, having become the owner and head of his own recording label, Montilla Rec­ords, hired his fellow Puerto Rican to rec­ord the lp Ñáñigo with Obdulio Morales and His Native Cuban Orchestra and Chorus.40 At that point, Fernández became synonymous with the Afro-­ Cuban repertoire. As mentioned, Ñáñigo led, years l­ater, to Rudolph Bing’s invitation to sing ­under the auspices of the Metropolitan Opera.41

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Light-­operatic Afro-­Cuban ­music was regarded as folkloric even though it was not, strictly speaking, culled from folkloric investigations but entailed writing songs (as Alejo Carpentier explained and ­others have since echoed) that sought to re­create the spirit of the original sources into learned sheet ­music written in Western notation.42 The syncope, rather than rhythm, is the musical bridge between what the composers saw as the raw material of black ­people and sheet m ­ usic they wrote as true composers. They aspired to the classical sense of writing ­music, of higher value than pop songwriting and therefore more worthy of expressing the au­then­tic national essence, in this case, Cuban. The composers and producers of t­ hese rec­ords sought to embody blackness sonically or what we could better describe as dominant notions of blackness and not ­actual ­music created by black Cubans.43 Paradoxically, Afro-­Cuban ­music encased the singer in the very ste­reo­ types ­running ­counter to ideals of racial harmony and blending of the races touted by Puerto Rican and Latin American nationalism, which she came to assume (recalling her improbably celebratory vision of the blending of the races as evidenced in her own f­ amily line).44 The operatic repertoire did satisfy one of her cherished desires: to be listened, not danced, to, as it was ­music for listening, through rec­ords or in the plush seats of Havana’s Teatro Nacional. Operatic black ­music falls ­under art and folk discourse but is removed from the lowbrow associations pop­u­lar ­music was subjected to. The liner notes to Ñáñigo read, “Fernández has shown the world her race’s innermost temperament with hit ­after hit, through her interpretations of tropical pop­u­lar ­music, of black ­music, with a supreme spiritual elegance . . . ​that is Ruth Fernández, whom her fellow Puerto Ricans call ‘Puerto Rico’s Singing Soul.’ ” As with the earlier Puerto Rican recordings in the so-­called Afro style, the marketers and producers played with the idea that Fernández ­either identified with the content or embodied it. Ascribing “el sentir de su raza” to Fernández based on this repertoire becomes rather vexed. It asserts a homogeneous black (perhaps Ca­ rib­bean) subject, resolved by the idea of a spirit that Fernández presumably embodies ­because she is a virtuoso. While Fernández most certainly identified as a Latin American, her descriptions of black m ­ usic ­were always modeled on African American and Afro-­Caribbean ­music, on soul, sabor, and feeling. The liner notes for this ­album appear to emphasize, however, an elite vision of blackness as racial spirit and a nonthreatening experience of feeling, instead of con­temporary soul or sabor musical forms. Ana María Ochoa Gautier has spoken of a “tamed vocality” in another context, that of nineteenth-­century

So What If She’s Black?  85

philology.45 H ­ ere, taming is paired with an emerging Latin Americanist variant of the semiclassical, with the caveat that Fernández’s capacity for volume places her vocality nearer to a limit between tamed and unbridled sound, closer to the “extimacy” she represented than to a purely domesticated v­ oice. Content-­wise, most of the songs in Ñáñigo allude to slavery as hard work that makes the subject inherently moral and portray the black subject as passively melancholic. An example of this is “Facundo,” successful in the light-­ operatic style, musically speaking, although problematic thematically. The singing voice, marked linguistically as black, exhorts “Facundo” to work (“trabaja, negro, trabaja”) so that he ­will not be called lazy (“pa’ que no te digan vago por la calle”). Eliseo Grenet set to ­music a now-­obscure poem by Teófilo Radillo of the afrocubanista movement in poetry, originally as a tango-­congo. Fernández and Obdulio Morales, playing with a symphonic arrangement in all likelihood imposed by standards of taste, produced a parlor song with a tragicomic air. The original liner notes describe this song as “humorous.” It is hard to discern any humor in Fernández’s interpretation, although she could not maneuver around the song’s paternalism. She obviously sought to invest the per­for­ mance with dignity, given its problematic portrayal of the black subject’s interpellation. She employed declamatory singing featuring long end notes, the rise and fall of voice highlighting cadence, and full volume at the very end of the piece with a full orchestra accompaniment. The result to con­temporary ears might be akin to a ­battle between her virtuosic interpretation and the song’s musical portrayal of the black subject as childlike, in need of moral and parental guidance. “Facundo” became part of the standard 1950s repertoire. Comparing Fernández’s track to t­hose of two Cuban g­ reats, Rolando Laserie and Celia Cruz, we find dif­fer­ent strategies to deal with the song’s problematic portrayal. Laserie’s is geared t­oward dance m ­ usic; it is a slow-­tempo mambo–­cha cha cha; it downplays the genealogies of slavery and gestures t­oward a slightly more con­temporary countryside. “Negro” becomes a conversational, everyday, in-­group appellation, instead of the sepulchral identity of Fernández’s and Morales’s rendition. Cruz, in the meantime, sings in a slower tempo than Laserie, reminiscent of ritual visions of Cuban blackness (such as ones Cruz herself recorded at the start of her c­ areer and ­later abandoned), producing her own brand of virtuosity: switching from major to minor at vari­ous points, anticipating the beat, repeating phrases and syllables in a low-­intensity soneo (improv), she succeeds in distracting the listener from the lyr­ics’ problematic 86  Chapter 2

content. She turns “negro” into the familiar, affectionate, intragroup appellative “negrón.” Fernández definitely acted the song much more than her contemporaries, taking it at face value as a tale of ­labor and salvation. Significantly, in a column published about a de­cade ­later, she spoke of herself as a “frustrated actress” and only half-­jokingly wrote, “I would have liked to work more on the stage. But, give the p ­ eople what they want: My public demands that I give them my spirit in my songs.”46 This suggests a play with “spirit” that goes beyond the ­simple mouthing of dominant dictates about blackness; it suggests performative strategies and artistic owner­ship. ­There is room to won­der if Fernández saw the movie Romance musical with the Argentinian marquee artist Libertad Lamarque in 1947, and what her reaction was. One of its musical interludes shows Lamarque performing “Facundo” in blackface. The frame is rife with crude, racist ste­reo­types of black p ­ eople as lazy, along with the usual plantation props of bananas, fans, and palm trees. Sonically, Lamarque affects a “Cuban” “black” voice, including breaking out of the song in its chorus by literally screaming its “Ay ay ay ay” chorus as if simulating what —­ the savage? the buffoon? —­ definitely not the laborious Facundo seeking to ward off accusations of being socially unfit and inassimilable to the greater good that Fernández attempted to re-­create. Lamarque’s interpretation is an instructive, although unacceptable, counterpoint to Fernández’s emphasis on dignity, amplified by Fernández’s filiation with the classical sound of symphonic ­music despite all of this latter route’s limitations. Lamarque, a soprano, became known as “La Novia de América” (The bride of the Amer­i­cas) and was hugely influential. Clearly Fernández would never be known by such epithets, and her contralto could never have stood in for the transnational, white, Eu­ro­pean, and Christian ideal of femininity that presumably bound the emerging Latin American nations together. With this brief sonic reconstruction, the reader may begin to listen differently to recordings such as “Facundo” and its moment, 1952. The w ­ hole of Ñáñigo was clearly intended to evoke the sweeping, epic misery of the black subject. To pres­ent-­day ears, the rec­ord might sound brooding and somber in the cinematic sense of movie ­music, reminiscent of con­temporary movie or Broadway scores. The effect is decidedly theatrical (although not deconstructive, as in, for example, Bola de Nieve’s [Ignacio Villa] interpretations of the repertoire for cabaret, or unabashedly fervent, as with Merceditas Valdés’s interpretations). Overall, Fernández switches from soft singing in major notes to full sonority, often accompanied by minor notes blasted from the brass So What If She’s Black?  87

sections of the orchestra. Fernández speaks some of the verses as if onstage. Many of the songs impel the black subject ­toward rest (“Drume, Lacho”). Drums are remarked upon often (“Chivo que rompe tambó” twists this appellation with a double meaning of buffoonery and religion). Orishas are called upon for help, as in “Mi Ochún.” In sum, in t­hese dominant portrayals, the black subject emerges as an emblem of universal, virtuous suffering, sometimes alleviated by the “natu­ral” comic streak white composers often imposed on their creations. The black subject is rendered monotonously the same, always and forever, as identical to colonial times, in a decidedly archaic slant.47 Yet the artists’ per­for­mances and the ­little-­known story of Ñáñigo’s reception belie traces of another world that h ­ asn’t been incorporated into scholarly accounts of pop m ­ usic (except for salsa of the 1970s), but in which Fernández must have traveled. Obdulio Morales and His Native Cuban Orchestra and Chorus accompany her. The Native Cuban Orchestra might be a fantasy; the musicians ­were members of the National Symphony of Cuba, apparently repurposed for nativeness (read blackness). As Cristóbal Díaz-­Ayala recounts, Morales was a believer. He consulted with the orishas before agreeing to rec­ord the ­album and, as instructed by the gods, he tied a red ribbon to each microphone before recording. The recording session was allegedly done in one sitting, through the night, as that was one of the religious conditions Morales had to follow.48 Beyond the information this anecdote conveys, we can imagine the scene of the recording and how it perhaps invested the chosen songs with another interpretation not available in sheet transcription but only discernible in the traces it left on the rec­ord itself. This may contextualize Fernández’s vision of her voice as anima, or spirit. Fernández is a bit of a mystery in religious terms. Although she said in public that she was Catholic, and always spoke in Christian terms, it is well known that many Puerto Rican santero families revered her as a special being. It was not uncommon to see pictures of Fernández in santero homes. A freelance assistant in film and tv productions in the 1980s recounted visiting Fernández while at work and witnessing a coterie of w ­ omen dressed in white —­ most certainly Ocha priestesses —­ in Fernández’s home.49 ­Whether or not she practiced, Fernández felt bound spiritually to the religion, which opens up the question of a divergence between her interpretation and the a­ lbum’s mostly bourgeois or petit-­bourgeois listeners. Helio Orovio, noted Cuban ­music historian, cites “Facundo” as a song of praise for one of the orishas. Although he does not provide more information as to which orisha is being honored or

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summoned, this knowledge alters the song’s layer of meanings considerably, and the ­album’s.50 Fernández’s interpretation of another classic with religious overtones, “Chivo que rompe tambó,” is terrific, very dif­f er­ent from the equally masterly interpretations of contemporaries such as Bola de Nieve (whose cabaret per­for­mance was also highly musically literate). Amusingly, the liner notes for Ñáñigo miss the most impor­tant ele­ment of the song —­ the sacred drum —­ and do not even acknowledge the myriad meaning pop­u­lar sayings had in the context of religious practices that ­were con­temporary to the 1940s, not at all relics of the past. The notes describe the song literally: “a pop­u­lar saying from slavery days . . . ​meaning that the slave who defies customs, pays with his own flesh, a reminder of the Slavedriver’s whip,” ­either willfully or truly ignorant of the song’s multilayered levels of meaning and its origins in the patakis, or sacred stories, of the Ocha religion. Arguably, along with the discursive conditions for listening I have outlined, and the visual reproducibility of her performing body, the sound of Fernández’s uniqueness —­ by then established culturally —­ in itself did a large amount of the work of “sounding black” for elites. This, possibly, was in a way more impactful than the re-­creation of a presumptive vernacular form of Spanish or the condescending and occasionally disfiguring nature of paternalistic portrayals of the black subject (for all their assumed musical beauty). Both Cecilia Valdés and Ñáñigo represent watershed sonic interpellations and illustrate Fernández’s choices as a vocalist forced into an elite-­defined embodiment. Her schooling in singing is both a defense of humanity and a continuation of elite aesthetics. Neither rec­ord is out of print, and Ñáñigo enjoyed a ­later release as a four-­song ep.51

SEMICLASSICAL When I interviewed Fernández about her early musical experiences, certain phrases struck me as key. She referred to herself in school as “una negrita graciosa” (a cute ­little black girl) and “una negrita que canta en la escuela” (a ­little black girl who sang in school), seeming to ventriloquize ­others’ racist depictions; she explained her success by saying, “Era negrita fea, pero tenía una gracia, en las manos, todo” (I was an ugly ­little black girl but I was graceful, I moved my hands well, my movements) and with the open-­ended phrases, “Negra y qué, narisona y qué” (So what if I’m black? So what if I have a big

So What If She’s Black?  89

nose?), echoing racist characterizations that she ­either heard directly or experienced as she inhabited social space.52 In the course of her narrative, as it has unfolded in other interviews as well, she presented in infantile terms, inducing sympathy, and expressed her success in terms of psychological obstacles, inducing identification. She presented as an exemplar, as a model to follow, much like the pop ego psy­chol­ogy that influenced many Puerto Ricans in the 1960s, so vis­i­ble in magazine spreads of the time. Yet her insistence on her racial difference as the knot through which her ­career should be understood is left unexplained by simply taking her account at face value, as most commentators do. It is, instead, part and parcel of her variant of the thinking voice, the result of several de­cades of musical l­abor and not necessarily an expression of any “native” Puerto Rican or Ca­rib­bean racial typology. Commercialized blackness was a marketing ploy revolving around a presumptive identification between the singer and her musical material (as was the case with nearly all black ­women singers of the time) and this singer’s capacity to condense in one sign a dense grid of meanings that came from at least three distinct racial matrices: Puerto Rican, Cuban, and American. This capacity was made pos­si­ble by virtuosity and the values it supported. Before the 1950s, a racial matrix existed in Puerto Rico that ­shaped the circulation and reception of pop­u­lar ­music, certainly, but it was only a­ fter the establishment of the ela and the hegemony of the ppd that t­hese formats became much more stringently tied to cultural-­nationalist visions and also to the tourist market. At this point, post-­Ñáñigo, Fernández’s musical ­career experienced a drop in musical richness. Further, even the most perspicacious of critics fail to interrogate the elitist bent of Fernández’s ­career and the circumstances of her successful upward mobility. I want to be clear: I am not criticizing Fernández’s desire for upward mobility. As an individual, she reached her goal; she succeeded as a musician and l­ater as a po­liti­cal figure. As an icon, figuration, or sign, though, she is problematic, and unpacking the conflicts inherent in her mature persona is crucial, particularly regarding how populist understanding of pop­u­lar ­music and their concomitant uses of racial discourse at once claim exceptionalism while only partially disclosing or symbolizing the racial rejection upon which their claim for racial pro­gress rests (the “policy of the ostrich” I alluded to earlier). Fernández clearly sought to pres­ent blackness and black ­people as moral, responsible, educated, and hardworking, and not lewd, lascivious, party ­going, and irresponsible, as the racist discourse would claim. ­Whether she espoused this moral discourse as publicly during her first de­cade and a half 90  Chapter 2

as an artist is unclear. It would saturate her persona ­after the 1950s, once she became completely aligned with the ­middle-­and upper-­class modalities of taste via her recordings of the Afro-­Cuban, light-­operatic repertoire. A ­ fter her most estimable recording and performing period (the late 1930s and the 1940s), Fernández turned to an intense symbolization of “local color” during the 1950s and 1960s. In this endeavor she received the full backing of the government and the media. The discourses and the ­actual push ­toward pro­gress and Americanization clashed with older musical formats and former class-­based tastes, changing ­music culture vertiginously in 1950s Puerto Rico. Fernández’s enlistment by the ppd had to do directly with the successful implantation of a public perception of the artist as a vessel of values and protector of the national patrimony against foreign (read American) values and cultural artifacts.53 At the time, her internationalist projection and musical sophistication fit into the push to reassure tourists and investors that Puerto Rico was safe, that they could find entertainment and culture during their financial ventures or vacations. Fernández adjusted her m ­ usic to fit a m ­ iddle-­class aesthetic and started to address the working classes in the populist mode embodied most perfectly in Luis Muñoz Marín, who, according to Álvarez Curbelo, had long been her idol (“Ruth came from a tradition where Muñoz Marín and Roo­se­velt ruled Olympus”).54 While her musical education was s­ haped by the vivid 1930s in Ponce, a city that provided deep musical knowledge through practices inherited from the nineteenth ­century, and also new information coming in through the airwaves since radio’s inception in 1922 (via radio stations like wkaq and wnel), Fernández set aside ­these musical pursuits and passions and conformed to being a singularly fixed sign heavi­ly dependent on the elite’s sensorium and their expectation of acousmatic blackness.55 At home, she became the unofficial, cultural spokesperson of the ppd and local elites. Abroad, she functioned as their cultural ambassador. Her repertoire advertised a vision of Latin Amer­i­ca that was calibrated to the Good Neighbor Policy and the Alliance for Pro­gress. The manipulation of local culture, and the insertion of the local in a universalist paradigm, was key in this venture. (Other stars in this vein include the Mexican Jorge Negrete who, like Fernández, pursued Pan-­Americanism in the semiclassical, operatic style around this same time. Having failed to secure work in his first option, the opera, this tenor enjoyed a hugely successful ­career decked as a charro who sang rancheras with a full symphonic orchestra, and also became a symbol for changing U.S.–­Latin American relations. Libertad Lamarque, So What If She’s Black?  91

figure 2.3 ​­Advertisement, El Imparcial, April 4, 1961, for the tv show Cantemos con Ruth Fernández, on the state channel, wipr. The channel was named for the phrase, “Wonderful Island of Puerto Rico.” “We offer the Puerto Rican public this new series of programs, in which, once more, our most esteemed pop­u­lar ­music singer ­will showcase her artistic temperament.”

mentioned earlier, toured the region incessantly. She made stops in U.S. cities too, singing not only her core Argentinian repertoire but also boleros and folk ­music of vari­ous countries.) Supported by the newly founded ela, Fernández was a regular in New York. She filled the Teatro Puerto Rico in the Bronx in her per­for­mances, as well as multiple Latino spaces in the city. Her capacity to embody the ela’s promise of symbolic inclusion as a joyful and assured destiny is marvelously encapsulated in a newspaper ad for one of her tele­vi­sion shows, Let’s Sing with Ruth Fernández (figure 2.3). One cannot help but think of “the grace with my hands” of the l­ittle girl when seeing this image ­today. One of the highlights of Fernández’s c­ areer happened when the Metropolitan Opera House held “An Eve­ning of Latin American M ­ usic” on July 17, 1966, during the Met’s open-­air summer season concerts at the Lewisohn Stadium of the City College of New York. The Lewisohn, now demolished, stood on 138th Street between Amsterdam and Convent Ave­nues. A spectacular setting, adorned by an elaborate Doric colonnade, it had hosted landmark concerts, including several Gersh­win concerts (he played the solo piano part of his Rhapsody in 1927 and premiered his Cuban Overture in 1932); Marian An92  Chapter 2

derson in her first concert per­for­mance on August 26, 1925; and Ella Fitzgerald in concert with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 1965. It was indeed an honor to be chosen to perform at this concert, and it aligned Fernández with one of the ­great debates of the ­century, regarding the bound­aries between classical and pop­u­lar ­music. The Lewisohn programs w ­ ere conceived, as a w ­ hole, as educational ventures, bridges between the classical world and pop­u­lar ­music. Gersh­win’s ­music straddled the bound­aries between classical idioms and the American songbook; his oeuvre included both classical pieces and Broadway m ­ usic. As we saw, Fernández had sung roles modeled ­after Gersh­win in the Afro-­Cuban operatic repertoire, in which she had sought to invest pop­u­lar ­music with the values thought to inhere in classical forms. The Lewisohn concert opportunity presented as an occasion to showcase her beloved pop­u­lar ­music but also to envelop it with the aura of classical ­music, as she had learned to do. During the interview I conducted with Fernández, I was struck by her testimony about her ­music lessons and how they ran c­ ounter to her passion. I asked if she was trained, to which she responded that she had taken ­music lessons and had been taught some piano but, “When you start singing pop­u­ lar ­music, you immediately go out of your training. I wanted to sing pop­u­lar ­music, not what I was being taught in formal lessons. I liked sabor [soulfulness, funk], and also sentimental ­music. . . . ​I ­don’t know how to tell you —­ it’s so hard to talk about oneself like this . . . ​but the truth is, I liked all m ­ usic, ­music as a w ­ hole.” As a musical subject, she existed between the official interpellation hailing classical and virtuosic modes as the most refined execution of ­music and the everyday practices of pop­u­lar ­music surrounding her and ­those she heard on the radio, which ­were diasporic. I was intrigued by her description of the phonetic method she had used to learn En­glish and how this connected her to hundreds of Puerto Rican schoolchildren who ­were forced to learn En­glish as the subjects of empire, during the beginning de­cades of the twentieth ­century. The phonetic method coexisted with the “linguistricks” of Afro-­Antillean poetry, linking Fernández’s to minoritized discourses of “nativeness” as well as the ­grand ones of pro­gress. Yet it was evident that the use of phonemes to learn En­glish helped her orient her desires t­ oward other m ­ usics she felt just as deeply connected to, breaking the mold of nativism as Ponce, despite its classism, previously had. Part of this Lewisohn episode concerns how deeply Fernández admired the legacy of African American singing. She emphasized her special affinity with American black ­music and how she loved singing in En­glish: So What If She’s Black?  93

I used to sing in En­glish a lot. I recorded “Stormy Weather,” “St. Louis Blues.” I used to learn songs written in En­glish; I had a knack for them. They had an impact and still do; I loved them. We had a teacher who taught us En­glish with the Morrin Phonetic method. I ­will never forget her, Teresa Carrera. I loved the En­glish language. “A tisket, a tasket, I love my yellow basket.”  . . . ​I sang it since I was a child, from about seventh grade on. I loved the blues. Black ­music. I loved it. I loved its strength.56 I heard her sing several bars of “A-­Tisket, A-­Tasket” and “Summertime,” priding herself on her ability to sing in En­glish and claiming a musical lineage that included the first ladies of jazz. She voiced reverence for Anderson, a singer who must have been a model and who was frequently referenced in magazine articles portraying Fernández’s magnificence and social value. Perusing the complete list of Met-­sponsored concerts at the Lewisohn, one finds that African American sopranos sang opera roles (Gloria Davy sang Aida in 1958 and Leontyne Price had a recital u ­ nder solo billing in 1966), and that Marian Anderson returned to this stage the same year that Fernández sang (on July 3, 1965, Anderson performed part of Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait and spirituals with the Met Orchestra, a fact that must have impinged heavi­ly on Fernández’s desire to be invited and her consequent ac­cep­tance of the invitation). Although, in her by-­then typical public persona, Fernández feigned surprise and waxed ­humble at being picked to sing at the Lewisohn, I’m certain she was well aware of what this platform meant.57 I’m also certain that she was moved, not just by her imperative to represent Puerto Rico (particularly the still-­young ela), but also by the musical desire to share the space of the African American ­women singers she so admired. Why was it impor­tant for Fernández to label herself the first singer of Latin pop­u­lar ­music at the Met? What cultural work did the epithet “semiclassical” perform in the context of Puerto Rican/Latin m ­ usic? In one of dozens of articles on her in the early 1960s, we read, “She insists on her ­will to internationalize Puerto Rican ­music. ‘­There’s a lot of work ahead for our folklore. All countries are known through their ­music. A musical ambassador is sometimes worth ten diplomats. A song can achieve a lot more and more quickly than several speeches. We have to fight to take our m ­ usic everywhere. Plena says a lot. It’s pop­u­lar, but not vulgar. I always include danzas, plenas, boleros, even bombas in my repertoire. I aspire to one day be able to say: “I have done something for Puerto Rico.” ’ ”58 The notion of folklore had a long shelf life in 94  Chapter 2

the twentieth c­ entury, and it’s clear that pop­u­lar ­music is a demarcation of a boundary separating what should be included as the expression of a nation and what should be left out ­because it is vulgar. “Vulgar” appears in shades of black. Fernández claims that the plena is never vulgar, while she qualifies the bomba. Tomás Blanco, recall, categorized plena as a miscegenating genre, specifically stating it was not vulgar, claiming a moralizing potential to its mixing and clarifying its status as Hispanic ­music. He went so far as to claim that plena, while having an “elemento negroide” (Negroid [sic] ele­ment), “in e­ very other re­spect [it] is  —­  plainly  —­  white.”59 Bomba was never whitened in intellectual discourse. Fernández h ­ ere stresses her willingness to represent the pop­u­lar, “even the bomba” (read: even black m ­ usic), in ser­vice to Puerto Rico. If we go back to her 1940s repertoire, neither bomba nor plena w ­ ere prominent or possibly even pres­ent prior to the ela’s rise in the 1950s. On the island, semiclassical appealed to ­middle-­class taste. In New York City, semiclassical performed nostalgia for the homeland as defined by middlebrow culture, as it was geared specifically to Latino immigrants in New York. It proffered a version of the “civilizing mission,” a message to immigrants in the city living through the turbulent 1960s. A po­liti­cal ­will dictated the employ of Fernández’s musical voice in her role as cultural ambassador, as she characterizes her life endeavor repeatedly during this time. In the 1970s, she would define her entry into politics as derivative of ­music: “The language of m ­ usic ­will serve as the pious background to my work as senator. . . . ​Art is a universal language, capable of bending w ­ ills and unifying hearts.”60 This “language of ­music” masks the cold rationality of many po­liti­cal maneuvers in the ela’s heyday, starting with the massive migration of Puerto Ricans to New York. They ­were left to survive as best they could, with no real government aid and facing several de­cades of being derided in their own homeland. Figure 2.4 is the program for “An Eve­ning of Latin American ­Music,” for which Fernández was paid 850 dollars. She chose the repertoire for the eve­ning. Fernández assumed a didactic, even paternalistic role through ­music, that would be increasingly calibrated t­oward the explic­itly po­liti­cal. ­Here musical re­spect for pop­u­lar ­music (albeit with qualifiers) mixed with calculus, dovetailing with Fernández’s own belief in ­music’s pedagogical mission and her championing of the ­music industry’s development in Puerto Rico and Latin Amer­i­ca as evidence of pro­gress. Excerpts of her statements to the press clearly indicate her belief: “Now that I am older . . . ​I realize that I did not just come into this world to entertain. I have a responsibility as an artist and as So What If She’s Black?  95

figure 2.4 ​The program for An Eve­ning of Latin American ­Music, Summer Concerts at Lewisohn, Metropolitan Opera House, July 17, 1965.

a citizen to speak out for my ideas.”61 And, queried by a reporter for the top entertainment journal Bohemia in 1967: —­ What do you think of ­today’s art? —­ That it should not develop only along the lines of entertainment. . . . ​ Art has to respond to deeper goals and objectives. . . . ​It should spark patriotism . . . ​advocate for the fraternity of nations . . . ​and of races.62 The eve­ning’s repertoire buttressed an agenda not only to reaffirm puertorriqueñidad (Puerto Ricanness) but latinoamericanismo (Latin Americanism), the prevailing discourse governing notions of cultural ambassadorship and mediating relations with the United States as the economic power throughout the hemi­sphere. Fernández, attentive to populist detail, married folklore and pop­u­lism to the prestige associated with high forms of m ­ usic, as represented by the symphonic orchestra. The New York Times reported Fernández had distributed “five or six favas [sic] . . . ​so she could feel more at home”; in the Puerto Rican press, the pavas multiplied to ninety so that, in the Puerto Rican imagination, the entire orchestra had donned pavas during Fernández’s per­for­mance. The pava or straw hat worn by farmhands to shield themselves from the sun had become the foremost symbol of the ppd. Purportedly, it symbolized the Puerto Rican peasant, the jíbaro, he whom the ppd had saved and also modernized (or saved ­because it had modernized). We ­will turn to this figure in chapter 3; suffice it to say that this symbol of whiteness, aside from erasing the racial identity of many jíbaros, directly occluded Afro–­Puerto Ricans in the mandated imaginary and its requisite sensorium as the ­century progressed. Fernández’s distribution of pavas entails the joining of two dissonant cultural and social signs. The penchant for hyperbole in the colonial press ran deep, ­because the same article reported that Fernández’s voice “could be heard throughout the island of Manhattan” ­because of “a specially outfitted machine capable of disseminating her canticles to all the limits of this ­great city.”63 I cannot verify what this machine was. However, we can note the importance of technological reproduction and how it alters the perception of Fernández’s vocal success, augmenting the potential of her vocal virtuosity for po­liti­cal marketing internationally. We can also verify the mystical prestige of operatic singing in this national context (pop songs referred to as “canticles”), already instilled as the preferred pedagogical model of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. So What If She’s Black?  97

Fernández was, undoubtedly, the thread of the entire program of “An Eve­ ning of Latin American ­Music.” ­After an opening instrumental set (consisting of “Janitzio” by the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas and “The ­Little Train of the Caipira” by the Brazilian Heitor Villa-­Lobos), Fernández took the stage in her Latin Americanist persona, in a set titled “Latin American Folk Songs.” She sang two songs from Ñáñigo, a Venezuelan joropo, and a Dominican merengue. The soprano Martha Pérez was slated to follow with four songs labeled simply “Cuban” (this singer was not marked as folkloric, like Fernández) but had to skip the set ­because of a “slight indisposition.” The se­lections for the climactic section of Act I, “Traditional Songs of Puerto Rico,” clearly conformed to the dominant, official folkloric appreciation of Puerto Rican m ­ usic at the height of the 1960s: a danza, a canción jíbara, a bolero, a didactic bomba by Lito Peña, and a festive plena. (No Nuyorican bugalú, jala jala, or working-­class plenas and bombas, even in the wildly successful, crossover Rafael Cortijo style, ­were included; the concert did not feature any jíbaro musicians, although they w ­ ere hugely pop­u­lar in 1960s New York.) A ­ fter the intermission, Fernández reprised her role as Dolores Santa Cruz, the former slave, in the Cuban operetta Cecilia Valdés, which she sang with Martha Pérez, the Cuban soprano, and Aída Pujol, a Puerto Rican mezzo-­soprano. The Dominican Bienvenido Bustamante and the Cuban Alfredo Munar shared conducting duties.64 Clearly, the repertoire and the musicians represented a proto-­Pan-­Latino ensemble responding to shifting paradigms of identity in the city, while emphasizing the overwhelmingly Puerto Rican numbers among the concertgoers. The Puerto Rican press described the Lewisohn concert as an opportunity to “vestir a nuestro folklore de etiqueta” (dress up our folklore in a tuxedo), and this reporter states, “It is up to Ruth Fernández and Bienvenido Bustamante to impose our ­music on the world.”65 Although a g­ rand stage, one internationally known, with three operatic singers, the se­lection of three ­women singers and the framing of their work as folklore suggest the work of the feminine as implanting and sustaining a state mandate to domesticate unruliness. The New York Times review described the concert as “an eve­ning of fun.” According to the reviewer, the introductory set “gave no hint . . . ​of the infectious high spirits about to burst forth in the person of Miss Fernández. . . . ​ The contralto revealed a dark, creamy voice and an utterly irresistible musical personality.” The reviewer also praised Fernández’s per­for­mance in Cecilia Valdés (“she was just as impressive in the operetta as in her songs”), although he described the operetta in decidedly minor language, calling it “this colorful l­ ittle work.”66 I need not point out the evident racism of the review, couched 98  Chapter 2

in benevolent language treating Fernández as quasi-­infantile. And yet the reviewer did note how Fernández worked the huge crowd and commandeered the ­music. This must have required ­great musical chops and vocal dexterity, given a professional orchestra of symphonic size. By contrast, the New York Herald Tribune reported, with no apparent irony: “Inter-­hemispheric relations, ­music-­division, ­were appreciably strengthened Saturday at Lewisohn Stadium when the Metropolitan Opera, in a Latin-­American eve­ning, played host to a variety of artists and compositions not generally heard in concert halls.” The reporter described Fernández as a “sultry-­voiced Puerto Rican contralto,” who “swept onstage to sing folk songs from pre-­Castro Cuba, Venezuela and Santa [sic] Domingo, as well as a traditional group from Puerto Rico, including the haunting ‘Preciosa’ of Rafael Hernández.” He remarked on Fernández’s educational and humorous r­ unning commentary, describing the repertoire and per­for­mance as “a series of warmly sung, expressively interpreted se­lections, occasionally with what she slyly referred to as ‘the Metropolitan touch.’ Giulietta or Judy she may not be, but Miss Fernández proved herself a unique addition to any oas (Organ­ization of American Singers).”67 In this review, Fernández is obviously belittled, yet differently from the New York Times review. “Sultry” seems to sexualize her somewhat; saying she “swept” onstage would have been uncharacteristic, given the displays of coolness and reserve Fernández usually exhibited, proceeding from her stated mantra of “I always make p ­ eople want me” through a per­for­mance of studied indifference. It may be that she was overwhelmed emotionally by the occasion; I ­don’t doubt it. (Expediency cannot narrate the entire story of her investments.) However, in the absence of properly musical descriptions of her contralto in per­for­mance, ­there is room for doubt of the Herald Tribune’s description. More impor­tant is the crass comparison to Giulietta and Judy. Giulietta might be the mezzo Giulietta Simionato. Judy is of course Judy Garland. The statement is not vague about Fernández’s inferiority to the two, but is vague about where exactly this inferiority should be located. Is it within the coordinates of classical singing or virtuosic pop­u­lar singing? Is ­there a quarrel with her contralto being out of place in both realms? Naturally the reference to the “Organ­ization of American Singers” lays bare the direct intervention of Cold War uses of culture, something Fernández surely knew all too well and, more likely than not, embraced. Fernández’s affiliation with both pop­u­lar and classical registers, which can be condensed as the semiclassical, was woven into her discographical work So What If She’s Black?  99

of the 1960s, responding directly to the Puerto Rican state proj­ect. The liner notes to Yo soy la que soy (I am the one), released the same year as the Lewisohn concert, 1966, read, “For quite some time now, when speaking of the Puerto Rican entertainment industry it is imperative to mention the name of Ruth Fernández, the ­woman from Ponce who has gained the love and re­spect of all of Latin Amer­i­ca not just thanks to her magnificent interpretations of Puerto Rican folklore but ­because she has known how to elevate the name of her Enchanted Island to faraway stages, and gain fame among the pop­u­ lar ele­ment and also the fans of semiclassical ­music.”68 “Música semiclásica” refers to the operatic Afro-­Cuban ­music lps. Fernández never recorded this ­music again, but it remained at the center of her figuration as an icon of normative blackness. Semiclassical is presented in counterpoint to an ambiguous “pop­u­lar ele­ment.” The boundary between the two might have been a source of anxiety: Where did pop­u­lar ­music and semiclassical meet? The unstated question was: How to elevate pop­u­lar ­music away from its unruly inclinations? Along with her lps and tele­vi­sion shows, Fernández had a tight concert schedule, which included pre­sen­ta­tions in the United States (such as the concert described above and o ­ thers at Car­ne­gie Hall, where Cecilia Valdés had been staged in October 1962). Increasingly, Fernández’s message in all of ­these per­for­mances closely aligned with the ela’s message to its nationals abroad and the potential tourist: Puerto Rico was a paradise with very minor racial prob­lems. Afro-­Cuban light-­operatic ­music was performed as a relic of a distant, colonial past, while Afro–­Puerto Rican forms ­were invariably enlisted to provide sonic examples of the pres­ent’s increasing state of harmony. Although not made explicit in the rec­ords, it is obvious that the point of comparison was the United States, particularly the segregated South, which Fernández mentioned in her interviews.69 On occasion, Fernández performed American songs, as was the norm in the repertoire tailored to tourists in San Juan; most of her late repertoire, however, circulated a nativist signifier of race, ­either via songs thematizing ethnic harmony or via her splendidly costumed body and her multiply layered, virtuosic contralto voice. Fernández exhibits, as a figure, colonialism’s temporal and ideological obfuscations. The recipient of virulent racism, her public persona nevertheless harkens back to the pre-1898 colonial order extolled by Hispanophiles to uphold the modernizing, pro-­American impulse of Luis Muñoz Marín. In the 1960s, specifically, at the heyday of developmentalism, Fernández emphasized the watered-­down, easy listening folklore that catered to a homogenized and sanitized vision of Afro–­Puerto Rican ­music in the face of the forms reign100  Chapter 2

ing in New York, seen as wild and lascivious. ­These ethnically and musically mixed, hybrid forms would presage the diasporic masterwork of salsa. Silvia Álvarez Curbelo observes, “The cultures of taste experienced a very impor­tant mutation. I believe this also holds true for Puerto Rican musical cultures. The ­middle classes adopt the taste for semi-­classical ­music, with its American bent, but they also recover the Spanish zarzuela. All of this to ­counter what they saw as the ‘plebeianization’ of Puerto Rico.”70 Commenting on the se­lection of tracks for the con­temporary rec­ord Yo soy la que soy, Eleuterio Santiago-­Díaz points out the ­album’s conformity to the ppd ideology and their cultural program aimed at the h ­ otel industry and tourism: “On the island, racial and identity discourses have usually privileged conciliation. . . . ​ The more radical gesture would be to shed light on the racial conflictivity that is contained in that zone of continuity.”71 Fernández would come to “shed light on racial conflictivity” in her ­later, po­liti­cal ­career as “the singing senator,” although not in any directly confrontational way. Simply her embodiment and how it was received cast t­ hese zones into relief very plainly. And, as mentioned, it is hard to adjudicate her racial analy­sis, unpalatable as it is at times, due to an entire infrapo­liti­cal experience we still ­don’t know about but that, undeniably, existed.72

THE ARTISTIC CLASS It was around this time that Fernández began championing the “artistic class.” This artistic class, Fernández claimed, would safeguard the nation’s most cherished values and its highest ideals in the face of accelerated modernization and seemingly successful pro­gress. Fernández took it upon herself to embody Puerto Rico’s Operation Serenity (a name straight out of Cold War culture), Governor Muñoz Marín’s symbolic and cultural operation that was parallel to the better-­known Operation Bootstrap, the economic program of the ela. “Artistic class” sounds a lot like “po­liti­cal class.” The first term came to mean an entity that was parallel, sometimes a shadow, to the second, gaining an ambiguous but power­ful po­liti­cal role. Fernández called on the government’s duty to nourish and protect this class b ­ ecause it performed work that was intrinsic to the establishment of Puerto Rico’s modernity and the creation of a space for the new citizen, who did not regard himself or herself colonially anymore but as the new subject of the ela, heading ­toward pro­gress. Serenity was never passed formally into law; nevertheless, it created the country’s chief institutions of ­music culture, enduring and indeed venerable So What If She’s Black?  101

institutions that survive to this day. A focus on Serenity shows how the state proj­ect relied on ­music as a stand-in for culture, as evidence of pro­gress, and as a placeholder of the aspirational mode of class interpellating most Puerto Ricans in the ela. Ernesto Ramos Antonini, a prominent ­lawyer who had a long ­career in the House of Representatives (1940–1963), eventually becoming its speaker and president, an Afro–­Puerto Rican not yet given his due in official historiography, a ponceño like Fernández, was instrumental in the shaping of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (Institute of Puerto Rican Culture), the Escuelas Libres de Música (State-­Funded ­Music Schools), the Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra), the Conservatory of M ­ usic, and the public radio and tv stations (wipr), all government-­run venues in which Ruth Fernández starred or was linked to, all linchpins of Operation Serenity.73 The economist Teodoro Moscoso, chief architect of Operation Bootstrap, went on to head the power­ful agency Compañía de Fomento Industrial. Fomento was assigned oversight of a festival to promote tourism in Puerto Rico and assuage tourists and investors about its civilized nature and its stability for investment, the Festival Casals de Puerto Rico (Casals Festival of Puerto Rico).74 Fernández became good friends with the festival’s namesake and chief draw, Pau (Pablo) Casals, who, as mentioned, had compared her voice to the sound of his cello.75 Woefully ­little has been written about Ramos Antonini’s thought pro­cess regarding the establishment of a national network of musical education and uplift through a curriculum in ­music appreciation. One can surmise, along lines relevant to Ruth Fernández as well, as lone black star body in the ela, that Ramos Antonini was very influenced by the postwar discourse of the rights of man and by liberation and decolonization movements in African and Ca­rib­bean socie­ties, including their recourse to aesthetics. Keeping in mind watershed theorists of negritude and decolonization, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who both became involved in statecraft directly, we can add depth to the incursions of Ernesto Ramos Antonini and Ruth Fernández into the po­liti­cal sphere. In addition, it should be noted that Fernández fully assumed a role exercised primarily by black men internationally, of linking cultural endeavor to the po­liti­cal solution of colonialism. By the close of the de­cade, Fernández argued that artists in Puerto Rico had no work ­because the country’s “folklore” was not showcased.76 She compared Puerto Rico to Mexico where, she opined, the government took better advantage of the potential of native forms of cultural expression to spearhead business and especially tourism.77 Of course, Puerto Rico is a tiny market compared 102  Chapter 2

to Mexico. But, at the dawn of the 1960s, it existed in a complex colonial relationship to the United States, functioning symbolically as a showcase for pro­gress and a beacon of liberty during the Cold War. In truth, pro­gress and liberty ­were myths, not realities; what is certain is Puerto Rico’s function, materially, as a military strategic point for the U.S. Army and tax haven for U.S. companies. The rest of Latin Amer­i­ca looked to its capacity to be an economic and po­liti­cal bridge between the United States and the southern countries, despite the routine cultural scorn it dispensed to the island-­nation. Puerto Rico played an enormous role in Cold War politics and U.S. expansionism, as is well known, due as much to its Latin American character (sold by Luis Muñoz Marín in vari­ous speeches for its value in the cultural Cold War) as to its status as American military outpost. (Recall that both Myrta Silva and Ruth Fernández ­were sent to entertain Puerto Rican troops during successive wars and in vari­ous army bases, underscoring entertainment’s relevance to cementing gendered, militaristic, colonial patriotism.) The defense of the artistic class is inseparable from the molding of Fernández’s life narrative of social mobility and her ascent into the social elite. It is very illuminating to consider Fernández’s increasing repetition of this tale of racial trauma as generative. I mostly reference Marvette Pérez’s Smithsonian oral history, with the clarification that it has appeared verbatim in other sources. This latter discourse is dif­fer­ent from the one that led to her status as Puerto Rican symbol of harmony and her Senate seat. Up to 1973, Fernández had claimed never to have experienced racial discrimination: “I know it has existed, but it has always been in muted form.”78 The factual accuracy of this claim is suspect, but what interests me ­here is the artist’s discursivity, her shift in pre­sen­ta­tion to a racial warrior. Fernández begins with a racial analy­sis of her childhood and ­family (which she refers to as a “rainbow”) and then proceeds to describe the skin color and hair texture of all her ­sisters, as well as the origin of her ­mother, ­father, and grandparents (meaning she identifies the white grandparents, the black ones, and the mulatos).79 She remembers her childhood as a paradise where color was irrelevant: “I did not know what racial prejudice was. I was not conscious of it, ­children played together.”80 According to the artist, she was inaugurated into the realities of racism through an incident that happened in the child’s first true social space, the school, where she belonged to the choir and was “la única negra en el coro” (the only black girl in the choir): “The first time I became conscious that I was black (I d ­ idn’t realize it u ­ ntil then) was a very painful experience. Nevertheless, it ­shaped me for life.”81 In this incident, she So What If She’s Black?  103

is passed over for a choir trip and is not given a satisfactory explanation. Then: “When I was walking home, my friend calls me and says, what teacher said was a lie. . . . ​I saw her when she was telling the other teacher, well Ruth is the best, but we have a prob­lem, she’s too black, and the girls in the choir are all white. . . . ​So what if I’m a ­little black girl? What does that have to do with it? I saw how in my h ­ ouse I had white s­ isters with kinky hair, a black grand­mother, and a white grand­father. I was so confused. I cried and cried.” She seeks solace (and an explanation) in her grand­mother, who delivers a long speech about racial equality, culminating with the following message: “That has nothing to do with anything. Your teacher is wrong. She is wrong ­because ­there is no difference between blacks and white p ­ eople. Black p ­ eople are prepared. The black person must study, must improve, he has to be educated [fino], have manners, he has to have every­thing or more than the white man b ­ ecause then, when t­ here is a discussion on this topic, all you have to say is, so what if I’m black?”82 The discourse exhibits some of the classic ele­ments of racist discourse u ­ nder colonialism: the importance of values, forgiveness for the American schoolteacher, tropes of common humanity, and the harmonizing potential of mestizaje (miscegenation). Yet it also enacts the classic diva quandary: Faced with an enormous obstacle, the diva or, more accurately, the diva to be, already a solitary and misunderstood figure, proclaims, I ­will sing!83 In this case, Fernández explic­itly racializes the diva cry: It becomes “negra, ¿y qué?” (So what if I’m black?). Not yet an adult, she receives the intimation of her destiny in puberty, another classic trope of the diva narrative. Fernández insistently places ­music per­for­mance in a social context and speaks at length about segregation in Puerto Rico. She spectacularly narrates how she broke racial barriers by refusing to enter the exclusive ­Hotel Condado Vanderbilt through the back door, as was customary for all black musicians playing in white establishments. Commenting on this episode, she states she was about sixteen or seventeen years old: “Todavía quedaban los blancos resabiosos que todavia creían en los prejuicios” (­There ­were still some holdouts, some resentful white folks who still believed in racial prejudice).84 Fernández states that her greatest satisfaction of the eve­ning came from making the dance c­ ouples stop dancing and listen to her voice —­ a scene of diva vindication that has to do with both racial pride and the creation of a space where race would momentarily evaporate. Clearly, Ruth Fernández stages the ­Hotel Condado story as her scene of vindication.85 Her objective, she narrates, was to stop the dancing and fixate every­body’s eyes upward, to her mouth, the source of her voice. Every­one had to listen and fixate on the singer, the 104  Chapter 2

opposite goal of dance ­music: “Once I started to sing, every­one stopped dancing. When I was done, a thunderous applause broke out. It was so loud that I turned to Mingo and asked him, feel better? I always make ­people want me.”86 The idea of racial paradise is undercut by her description of having been excluded from musical pursuits when she was a small child. Fernández displaces racism into an American schoolteacher, thus indirectly bolstering the myth that Puerto Rican society was not inherently racist. Instead, a foreign, temperamentally alien ele­ment came in and “brought the racism,” tainting a paradisiacal environment. Fernández opts for a cultural forgetting of racial trauma, symbolized in her childhood experience, and sutures the issue of Puerto Rican racism by creating a tale of vindication where she resolved both traumas —­ individual and social —­ by putting into practice her grand­mother’s recommendations. Despite her polished discourse, I have no doubt that Fernández resented her role as representative and, despite her multiple references to her own ugliness, ­there is room to won­der if she truly felt shame or if past a certain point she mobilized ele­ments of abjection as part of another operation (one that may be labeled po­liti­cal) and which she channeled through the artistic class.

I AM THE ONE Fernández’s grand­mother emphasized the importance of strategies to defend against societal conventions of beauty. The more personal question remains unanswered: Did the grand­mother consider her grand­daughter beautiful or simply capable of overcoming the obstacle that she thought her grand­ daughter’s body was? The self-­narrative does not proffer details about the intimate aspect of this quandary. It is pos­si­ble, however, to verify how Fernández’s abject portrayal as ugly clashed with the magnificence of her photographic image, which represents the theatrical femininity of the diva in publicity stills and ­album covers. Her iconography as revealed from the 1950s onward in ­album covers, publicity stills, and film appearances pres­ents a ­woman identified visually with high fashion, elite circles, and successful African American models. The visual rec­ord establishes that Fernández did not shy away from being photographed and considered attractive. She was photographed (and presented herself) as normative, but certainly not as ugly or undesirable. In her ­battle to “educate” the colonial subject, Fernández often discusses the importance of dress. She was a fashion plate.87 As is evident from the ­album covers with place name markers from local to hemispheric, Ruth Fernández So What If She’s Black?  105

figure 2.5 ​­Album cover, Ruth Fernández con la Orquesta Panamericana, Rumba Rec­ords lp 55572, 1960s, shows Fernández in a Motown pose.

con la Orquesta Panamericana (Ruth Fernández with Pan-­American Orchestra, figure 2.5) and Ruth Fernández, Es de Borinquen, con Machito y su Orquesta (She comes from Puerto Rico: Ruth Fernández with Machito and His O ­ rchestra, figure 2.6), she dressed to suggest refinement and a certain degree of aloofness. “I am obsessed by clothes. I like very feminine attire, with plenty of ruffles and lace.”88 She told Marvette Pérez how her experience in the ­Hotel Condado Vanderbilt involved some decisions about dress and how it contributed to fighting racism: “My grand­mother always told me, Ruth, you have to be well dressed. The first impression is the most impor­tant moment for an artist. . . . ​ If you arrive well dressed, you can be ugly, black, have a big nose, all that, but if you have a magnificent gown, that’s all they look at. . . . ​If you ­can’t dress up, then ­don’t go.”89 An alternate cover of Ñáñigo, retitled Ruth Fernández Sings, shows Fernández in costume, possibly as the ex-­slave Dolores Santa Cruz from Cecilia Valdés, likely an earlier picture from the 1940s. It pres­ents Fernández’s image as a guarantee of the singer’s connection to the m ­ usic and its raced sound (figure 2.7). It shows Fernández dressed to represent black identity as corre106  Chapter 2

figure 2.6 ​­Album cover, Ruth Fernández, Es de Borinquen with Machito and His Orchestra, Tico lp 1101, 1963?.

sponding to plantation life. Apparently the 1960s required a repeated return to colonial myths, since for Fiend of Dope Island (one of the island movies so pop­u­lar in the 1960s, which used the colony as a cheap movie set and portrayed its p ­ eople as ­either savage or country bumpkins), an older Fernández is dressed similarly to her costume for Ruth Fernández Sings (figure 2.8). In contrast to this vaguely colonial costume, con­temporary publicity stills show her fully inhabiting her more usual diva persona. Her extremely self-­ confident poses suggest the cool, reserved sensuality of American jazz divas. Ruth Fernández con la Orquesta Panamericana (figure 2.5) used as a cover one such still, colorized, showing Fernández with a rumbera-­style dress but no musical instruments (typically rumberas ­were photographed with percussive accouterments, such as maracas). With its sideways pose, looking down, arms spread, and the artist dressed in a refined, long gown, it intimates a cool sensuality that alludes to both respectability and femininity, very similar to the Motown photos of Diana Ross. The Motown influence is also evident in the cover of Es de Borinquen (figure 2.6), with hands tossed up and a slightly twisted body. So What If She’s Black?  107

figure 2.7 ​­Album cover, Ruth Fernández Sings, with Obdulio Morales and His Native Cuban Orchestra and Chorus, Montilla fm 54, 1955. The ­album was released in Cuba, the United States, Spain, and France. The cover shows Fernández in vaguely colonial dress, very dif­fer­ent from her usual high-­fashion persona.

Fernández was photographed dozens of times; ­there are many extant publicity stills across vari­ous de­cades, such as the one shown in figure 2.9, which appears to be from the early 1960s. Gazing at this image, it would seem that the feminine had no trou­ble being established in the scopic register, almost promising a jump forward beyond racism. Its repre­sen­ta­tion was more vexing when it came to sound, where it was inextricably linked to notions of “sonic blackness.”90 In the lp Yo soy la que soy (I am the one), Fernández recorded two songs that appeal directly to her figure as an icon of Puerto Rican and Ca­rib­bean blackness, and specifically as a black Ca­rib­bean ­woman.91 ­These can be considered signature songs, but, in contradistinction to Myrta Silva’s per­for­mance of “Nada” (chapter 1), ­these songs did not function as a letter supporting meaning while si­mul­ta­neously displacing it. Their relationship to the signifier of “Ruth Fernández” is not as successful. Ruth Fernández operated, to use a Lacanian approach, as an imaginary, not a symbolic construct. 108  Chapter 2

figure 2.8 ​Ruth Fernández as “Tula,” in a nonspeaking film role as a bartender. From the cult movie Fiend of Dope Island, 1961.

The first is the ­album’s title track, “Yo soy la que soy.” It differs from the second song I discuss, “Yo soy mulata,” in significant ways. The bandleader, Lito Peña, who worked closely with Fernández throughout her ela musical c­ areer, wrote the first song for Fernández. He incorporated a second title she had accrued during this time, “La Negra de Ponce” (The black w ­ oman from Ponce) and referred to bomba and plena in the lyr­ics. “Yo soy la que soy,” however, was not recorded with any bomba or plena instruments. The lyr­ics celebrate the ideal of racial harmony, as signified discursively by both bomba and plena, but stripped of their musical signs and hence disfigured in their black identity. They re-­create the view of racial harmony and the certainty of unqualified love on the part of her listeners (something we know to have been false, from the constant jokes about Fernández’s physiognomy, shockingly alive to this day). In this sense, the song mirrors exactly Fernández’s self-­narrative as having resolved the ravages of racism through her personal itinerary, where the final destination is national ­music: Yo soy la que soy, la que soy Cuidado que aquí llegó la Negra de Ponce So What If She’s Black?  109

figure 2.9 ​Publicity still of Ruth Fernández, photographer unknown, 1960s. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Puerto Rico.

La que baila la bomba La que canta la plena La que dice con gran orgullo soy pura . . . ​puertorriqueña Pa’ mí no hay problema racial Yo soy muy feliz con to’ lo que Dios me ha dado Yo no puedo quejarme Todo el mundo me quiere Y nací en esta bella islita en que todos somos hermanos I am the one; I am the one Be careful, the black ­woman of Ponce has arrived She who dances the bomba She who sings the plena She who says, with ­great pride, I am a pure . . . ​Puerto Rican ­woman! For me, ­there’s no racial prob­lem I’m very happy with what God gave me I ­can’t complain Every­one loves me And I was born on this beautiful island, where we are all ­brothers and ­sisters Fernández can be heard attempting to inject some irony and edge to the song, for example in the ellipsis creating a distance between “pure” and “Puerto Rican”: “yo soy pura . . . ​puertorriqueña.” It appears that Fernández was playing with saying “yo soy pura negra” (I am a purely black ­woman) especially ­because she sings, in a mockingly warning tone, “Be careful, the black w ­ oman from Ponce has arrived.” The possibility of a challenge to the dominant racial order is quickly quashed in the next stanza. The song “Yo soy mulata” (I am a mulata) is a dated racial portrayal, a resurrection of the 1930s and  1940s ideal of the mulata as a more acceptable version of the black ­woman, yet not fully integrated into the normative ideal, ­either. Despite its datedness and the lack of transparent references to “Puerto Ricanness,” Fernández’s per­for­mance strikes a deeper chord, functioning as a negative to the more straightforward signature of “Yo soy la que soy.” Rafael “Bullumba” Landestoy, a Dominican composer active since the 1930s, wrote “Yo soy mulata.” Landestoy wrote the song for Milagros Lanty, an Afro-­Dominican singer. Upon visiting the Dominican Republic while on

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tour, the Mexican ­great Toña la Negra (Toña the black ­woman) took the song with her to rec­ord in Mexico. Thus, we have three Afro–­Latin American singers, at least, who performed the song; in theory, ­there could be more, as the figure they represented was repeatable across vari­ous nations and collectives. In a nutshell, the song attempts to respond to racial shaming by presenting a celebratory account of mestizaje. On the surface, the song responds to the same dominant vision of m ­ usic’s capacity to resolve racial tensions. Yet while in “Yo soy la que soy,” the singer adopts a contrived joy, when listening to “Yo soy mulata,” the listener can divine at the very least her ambivalence via a superior vocal per­for­mance. Yo soy mulata Y a orgullo tengo Llevar la sangre de negro en las venas Yo soy mulata Y no me importa Que me critiquen Si yo tengo bemba Yo no sé por qué la gente Se preocupa porque tengo [jajaja] Y que pasa dura [ja ja] Yo no sé Y si visto de colores Me critican y me dicen Bueno negra pero qué mal gusto [jummm] Y que tengo yo Y no me importa Si tengo ñata A orgullo tengo Tener piel tostá Y no me importa Yo soy mulata Yo soy mulata Mulata en verdad Soy mulata De verdad 112  Chapter 2

I am a mulata And I feel proud Of the black blood in my veins I am a mulata And I ­don’t care If ­people criticize My thick lips Beats me why folks worry that I ­have so-­called kinky hair Who knows why? If I wear lots of color ­People criticize me and say Well, girl, what bad taste (hmmm) I supposedly have I ­really ­don’t care About my flat nose I’m very proud Of my brown skin I ­don’t care I am a mulata I am a mulata A true mulata I am mulata A true mulata The per­for­mance is punctuated at e­ very turn with displays of vocal virtuosity, particularly soaring into high notes, descending into very low notes, and employing operatic phrasing throughout. Fernández also speaks some of the verses, and incorporates laughter, as she did on “Y tu abuela onde etá.” She sings this song triumphantly, but the ambivalence is palpable. The identities, negra and mulata, are not collapsible into one another and create virtually impossible quandaries for the singer to ­settle in her preferred mode of triumphalism. Fernández never performed a song in which her name could come to signify a social “working through,” referring to herself instead by racial epithets, such as “la Negra de Ponce,” “negra,” or “mulata.” In “Yo soy mulata,” singing “I am a mulata” is as much an affirmation of pride as it is a re-­creation So What If She’s Black?  113

of the racial taxonomies and practices restraining and shaping her musical ­career. ­Whether the song is ironic in its repetition of the markers of supposedly benign racist discourse, including its ideal of sexualized feminine beauty, the mulata, is up for grabs. The per­for­mance ­doesn’t resolve one of the central prob­lems of this repertoire and of Latin Americanist racial discourse —­ whitening as social policy —­ even if on the surface the lyr­ics celebrate the mulata ideal. The per­for­mance of the fabulous that Fernández achieved, visually and vocally, is not enough to render the prob­lem sutured, much less confronted. On the contrary, her diva incarnation seems to have worked even better to suit the po­liti­cal needs of the ppd, which ­were to decree that racism in Puerto Rico was a minimal affair. One of the puzzles of Fernández’s conditional admission into elite circles was just how she managed to enter this white supremacist world. Her excellence in m ­ usic and star quality w ­ ere likely insufficient. The colonial feminine was the gateway, as it evolved in early c­ entury Ponce.92 It’s pos­si­ble that, at some point, Fernández became friends with the legendary local society lady “Doña Fela,” Felisa Rincón de Gautier, who before her segue into a long po­ liti­cal ­career as San Juan’s mayor (1946–1968) owned the Felisa Style Shop in Old San Juan. She might have become acquainted with Fernández b ­ ecause of their common passion for high fashion, the most in­ter­est­ing ele­ment in Fernández’s tale of star inception. Rincón may have sold Fernández dresses in the 1940s. We still lack information as to how exactly Fernández assumed a didactic role for the ppd, but do know she became particularly notable for performing a Rafael Hernández song, “Lamento borincano,” at multiple ppd rallies, cele­brations, and, just as importantly, events sponsored by ladies’ society circles, often spearheaded by the first lady, Inés Mendoza de Muñoz. Dress was a common denominator among ­these ­women, signifying their inclusion in a social class. Fernández also entered ­because of her vocal capacity, harbinger of her strangeness in this supremacist environment. This white or light-­skinned world surely regarded her paternalistically, or might one say, maternalistically, finding it difficult to cope with their feeling of discomfort while also experiencing a simultaneous fascination for their “pet.” Personally, I doubt the description of Fernández as a mulata would have had any purchase in this group, although elites generally would never disclose their feelings of contempt for and superiority over Fernández by calling her “negra” to her face, with all the word meant in that circle. Her songs of self-­ interpellation remain a puzzle. “Yo,” w ­ hether in “Yo soy la que soy” or “Yo soy mulata,” is a gap. 114  Chapter 2

“Lamento borincano” is a melancholy song about a peasant who tries to sell his agricultural products in the city and comes back empty-­handed, condemned to a life of poverty. It was a celebrated anticolonial song ­until it became Luis Muñoz Marín’s unofficial anthem. This gesture changed the song’s valence considerably, turning it into a cultural-­nationalist defense of the spiritual in­de­pen­dence of the nation and the stock values upon which it rested, irrespectively of self-­determination (the professed theme of the song cited in the beginning of the chapter, “Lamento de un boricua”). The transmission of the song rested, to an extent, on Fernández’s raced and gendered body, similar to Farah Jasmine Griffin’s description of “the recognizably black ­woman —­ singing rather than speaking . . . ​a familiar sight for American audiences. While each instance, each ­woman, each voice is unique —­ ­these ­women do not ‘sound’ alike —­ the physicality is familiar. The w ­ oman stands before a crowd in front of a microphone, mouth open, positioned to sing.”93 Like the singers Griffin names, Fernández is a social sign: the black ­woman with her mouth open and, eventually, the singing senator. 94 On top of that, as with the pavas she had distributed at the Lewisohn among the orchestra, “Lamento borincano” refers the listener immediately to the whitened social figure of the jíbaro. ­Here is an example of the sign of the “black ­woman singing,” prior to her properly po­liti­cal ­career, when the first lady called on Fernández to sing “Lamento borincano” at the height of her musical ­career: The meeting ended ­after Ruth Fernández, the Puerto Rican songstress, performed “Lamento borincano.” Mrs. Muñoz Marín introduced her as “a ­great Puerto Rican ­woman.” Most of ­those who attended the meeting ­were ­women, and they joined Ruth Fernández in the song that has served and still serves as the musical backdrop of the po­liti­cal meetings of the Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party. According to the organizers, a thousand ­people attended the gathering, which proceeded with the utmost order and enthusiasm.95 Fernández l­ater borrowed a page from Mendoza, starting to underscore her own variation of republican motherhood in the press and stressing her value as someone who could appeal to ­women voters specifically across class stratification: “­Women should participate in the politics of t­ oday, to give politics a touch of love, femininity, and warmth, to balance ­things out and calm violent dispositions. . . . ​I think Puerto Rico’s f­uture is in w ­ omen’s hands, and if we can have better girls, through preventive homes, we ­will have better ­women tomorrow.”96 So What If She’s Black?  115

By the time the 1970s rolled around, Rafael Hernández Colón, the ppd’s rising star, tapped Fernández to be senator at large on the party ticket that he headed as candidate for governor. Undoubtedly their common roots in and identification with seigniorial Ponce played a key role. Just as clearly, her symbolics of femininity, coded along the musical, and si­mul­ta­neously exhibiting and downplaying race, did too. She avoided giving details about how she got tapped for the Senate: “By the time I realized it, I was already in politics. It had been laid at my feet.”97 She spoke of friends who had approached her with the idea, and gave the impression she never sought out the nomination.98 Her campaign for Senate was baptized “La Negra Va” (the black w ­ oman’s in 99 it to win). Figure 2.10 is a detail of the 1972 election ballot on which Fernández was a candidate, along with other candidates for senator at large for the ppd, all men. Fernández appears represented by a musical instrument, a guitar. For her second ballot, in 1976, it was mandatory for all candidates to print their picture. Fernández appears once more against the backdrop of a guitar, the only candidate from the senator at large bracket to supplement her image with a symbol. As in ­music, in politics she was the lone black figure. Figure 2.11 is a scene from her 1972 campaign, possibly singing, in the Aibonito ppd headquarters. Fernández won election to the Senate both times, garnering a large number of votes. The idea of the musical figured prominently in Fernández’s po­liti­cal persona; she drew heavi­ly on understandings of pop­u­lar ­music as the spirit of the nation, or, as Álvarez Curbelo puts it, most succinctly, as a grid of identity in 1970s Puerto Rico, alongside sports.100 (She did not run in the 1980 elections; another artist and w ­ oman, the actress Velda González, replaced her on the ballot. Fernández served instead as the special assistant for cultural affairs during two consecutive terms of Rafael Hernández Colón, 1985–1993.) Fernández was eventually and unevenly admitted to Puerto Rico’s elite circles, arguably b ­ ecause, in the racist interpretation of her voice, she was thought of as nonfemale, a characterization that Fernández countered by foregrounding femininity in her public persona. Yet she also sought to represent respectability out of conviction and was promoted by the colonial government as the cultural ambassador of Puerto Rico abroad and ­later as a cultural icon in her ­career as senator. She deci­ded to embody the ideals of racial harmony so dear to Puerto Rican cultural nationalism and, in retrospect, redefined the terms upon which to understand this decision through a carefully constructed diva narrative of triumph and restitution. She went beyond her personal recollec-

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figure 2.10 ​Detail, election ballot of 1972. Ruth Fernández is listed as a candidate for ppd senator at large. Her symbol is a guitar.

tion to define the national act of recollection, upholding a Latin Americanist raced paradigm. “We are a single Amer­i­ca, of indigenous, black, and Spanish origins. That’s why Puerto Rico is at the vanguard among the Latin American countries.”101 During her Senate years, Fernández established the Compañía de Variedades Artísticas (Com­pany for artistic shows) and the Comisión de Arte y Cultura (Arts and culture commission). She cut a formidable figure. As the singing senator, Fernández became the avuncular figure instructing all colonial citizens to obey the new colonial state, the ela, for their own good, like ­children. She justified the ppd hegemony in politics by calling Puerto Rico “la Isla del Progreso” (Pro­gress Island), a take on the patriotic phrase “la Isla del Encanto” (Island of Enchantment).102 Talking to an interviewer in the 1990s,

So What If She’s Black?  117

figure 2.11 ​Ruth Fernández in her 1972 campaign for the Senate, speaking at ppd headquarters in Aibonito, Puerto Rico. The walls are plastered with the ppd symbol, a profile of a jíbaro with a pava (straw hat) and the logo “Pan, Tierra, Libertad” (Bread, land, liberty). Images of Luis Muñoz Marín and the 1972 ppd candidate for governor, Rafael Hernández Colón, are vis­i­ble. Fernández’s candidate poster is partially vis­i­ble in the center, and reads, “Ruth Fernández, El alma de Puerto Rico, Para el Senado” (Ruth Fernández, Puerto Rico’s soul, for the Senate). Courtesy of the Archivo General de Puerto Rico.

she clarified that her role in politics had been “public relations”: “When the governor needed me, I was sent to the proj­ects, barrios, and towns. I was sent to sing.”103 Through the tool of respectable femininity, in its incarnation as feminine song, Fernández instilled a devotional tie to the artistic class and its version of pop­u­lar ­music, fully utilizing ­music’s po­liti­cal potential. In the twenty-­first ­century, Raíces (Roots), a 2001 Banco Popu­lar special honoring the legacy of Afro–­Puerto Ricans in national m ­ usic, re-­created the scene of Fernández singing lead as a young ­woman in Ponce. It staged the scene to pres­ent a celebratory, nostalgic look back to a supposed golden age, with the express intent of targeting a neoliberal consumer. In the video, Fernández 118  Chapter 2

repeats her life narrative once more and sings “Y tu abuela onde etá” as an example of the roots ­music the video purports to honor. Her per­for­mance of the Fortunato Vizcarrondo poem in Raíces departs significantly from the one she performed as a twenty-­year-­old live and on the recording preserved on a 78 rpm rec­ord. When Fernández performed the song at the Escambrón Beach Club in the late 1930s, she was a very young ­woman, improbably leading an impor­tant orchestra, launching her ­career. By the time Fernández rerecorded it for Raíces, she had sung it on tv specials in Puerto Rico a fair number of times, often as part of greatest-­hits medleys recalling the past. In almost all of ­these pre­ sen­ta­tions, Lito Peña arranged the song. Peña is the bandleader who wrote “Yo soy la que soy” (I am the one) for her and whose orchestra frequently served as Fernández’s accompaniment in 1970s and 1980s Puerto Rico. Peña’s ­later arrangement for “Y tu abuela” echoes the sonic clichés of “Yo soy la que soy”: blandly orchestrated Afro–­Puerto Rican m ­ usic catering to the m ­ iddle classes. None of the original bite of Fernández’s first recording of this song with Mingo and His Whoopee Kids is recalled. Extant videos show Fernández cavorting in an expensive designer dress while performing, sometimes punctuating the ending with, “Mira, y que decirme negra a mí” (Can you believe he said I was black). We simply cannot know if she was avowing or disavowing her black identity. Given my certainty that another conversation existed between Afro–­Puerto Rican musicians exclusively, t­ here is ample room to believe it was an ironic address. The original recording of “Y tu abuela” is auratic ­because it’s imbued with an unrecoverable pastness. A disturbing normalization of this song’s history unfolded when Fernández became senator; it was only slightly revised in Raíces along the neoliberal format of nostalgia. ­Later per­for­mances could have revived the importance of “Y tu abuela,” elucidating its witness to a problematic past of segregation, while updating its arrangement.104 Perhaps in bomba? Or in salsa? Or jazz, a genre Fernández clearly enjoyed singing in? Raíces is not quite triumphalist, but it does suture the clear wounds Fernández incurred. I have attempted to touch this past or arkhé in this chapter, get close to this black diva of Puerto Rico. A diva is not supposed to have any markers next to her name; she must simply be, transcendent and unique. Fernández thought of herself this way. Her protestation, “¿Negra, y qué?” (So what if I’m black?), traces her life according to this calling, from her grand­ mother’s words, famously presaging not only her artistic triumph but also So What If She’s Black?  119

her ­po­liti­cal ­career, through a series of obstacles overturned, principally, by her presumptively strange voice.105 The remark has overtones of the mournful, however. As a looking back at her inclusion on the problematic terms of a society stratified by race and class, it has been read as heroic. I’ve tried to pry open the phrase to reveal the wound. I’ve also sought to listen more carefully: voice’s potential to become a thinking voice, to intimate the voice that’s been suppressed, lives spectrally on as a ­battle cry: ¿Negra, y qué?

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THREE

TECHNE AND THE LADY The c­areer of Ernestina Reyes, “La Calandria” (San Lorenzo, 1925–­Bronx, 1994) illustrates mid-­twentieth-­century historical pro­cesses in a gripping way through the ­career arc of her voice. She became a star in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, just when the Estado Libre Asociado (ela, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) was born. Calandria was the first w ­ oman música campesina (country ­music) singer to appear on both radio and tele­vi­sion. Over the course of two de­cades, she recorded an uncommonly large number of tracks for a ­woman, a feat made all the more remarkable ­because she routinely received sole or main billing, collaborated with the very best vocalists of the country ­music genre, and was as a m ­ atter of course backed by master country m ­ usic cuatro players, certifying her revered standing. She became the epitome of country ­music’s so-­called female voice, towering over her female colleagues in terms of a recording ­career, live pre­sen­ta­tions, and iconic impact.1 Like other “greatest ­women artists,” her colleagues and the wider public insisted on understanding her voice through a gender separation that rendered her secondary to men, notwithstanding the equality of her prowess. Calandria participated in country m ­ usic radio programs just when the Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party (ppd) was asserting its hegemony over Puerto Rican politics, around 1948. Circa 1951 she was featured in a pop­u­lar radio program, La hora del volante (The driver’s hour), with Florencio Morales Ramos, known as Ramito, regarded as “the greatest jíbaro singer” (male singers did not suffer from being marked by their gender). Over the course of this pivotal de­cade, Calandria, Ramito, and a host of notable country musicians participated in heavi­ly promoted goodwill tours to the United States (especially New York) to aid in the ela’s quest to pres­ent itself as the mi­grants’ amigo (friend), a positioning illustrated in two state-­produced educational videos of 1952 and 1956, Un amigo en Nueva York and Un amigo en Chicago.2

Ernestina Reyes was the fifth of nine siblings. Calandria was not formally trained in ­music, but she did receive some ­music lessons when she was young and was able to play some guitar. She began singing professionally with her ­sister, Carmen, as part of the duet Las Hermanas Reyes (The Reyes ­Sisters). The young girls listened assiduously to the radio. They w ­ ere fans of the radionovelas of the 1940s (radio soap operas), especially El derecho de nacer (The right to be born), with Lucy Boscana and Mona Marti, two well-­known Puerto Rican radio stars who went on to become two of the most recognizable character actresses on tele­vi­sion soap operas. ­These radionovelas, as is to be expected, veered ­toward the melodramatic. They targeted ­women  —­  particularly working-­class ­women  —­  as their audience. Las Hermanas Reyes debuted on a musical segment of the radio news program La correspondencia (Correspondence), hosted by Rafael Quiñones Vidal (Puerto Rico’s founding radio personality and impresario). I recall the microphone hung from the ceiling . . . ​I was 12; Ernestina was 10. We ­were ­going to sing ‘Sin bandera’ [Without a flag] but it was banned ­because it was considered a Nationalist song. . . . ​‘Sin bandera’ was all the rage; ­people sang it on the streets. [Sings] We Puerto Ricans, we do not have a single corner to call our own. . . . ​My ­father was a Nationalist and close friends with Pedro Albizu Campos. He was the godfather of one of my ­brothers, along with his wife Laura Meneses. . . . ​ Prob­ably my ­father chose the song, I ­don’t remember. Since we ­couldn’t sing ‘Sin bandera’ we sang ‘Campanitas de cristal’ [Glass bells]. Rafael Seijó and Pedro Dávila played guitar. Ernestina sang melody and I sang harmony.3 Calandria sang with her s­ ister ­until approximately 1948, when Carmen got married. Carmen recounts they first sang boleros and danzas, and that she never liked jíbaro m ­ usic. According to Carmen, Ernestina started singing jíbaro ­music at around eigh­teen. Ernestina gave birth to the first of two d ­ aughters when she was sixteen.4 She quit school to take care of the baby while Carmen attended university. Carmen was not ­eager to take a job, preferring to stay at home, even though her husband did not forbid her from singing. Ernestina, by contrast, was passionately involved with ­music and could not wait to launch herself as a professional. “Germán Nigaglioni was recruiting talent for a show he had brought with him from Cuba, the Colgate Show with Calandria and Clavelito. They paid seventy-­ five dollars a week. . . . ​My ­father made eighty dollars a month as a sanitation 122  Chapter 3

employee. . . . ​Ernestina was making more than a schoolteacher!”5 It was as hired talent for this program that Calandria started singing the traditional décimas of the countryside, over the radio, in the capital city of San Juan.6 ­There ­were a c­ ouple of topics per show, which w ­ ere fodder for controversias, sung competitions between two singers who followed the rule of the pie forzado: a refrain ending each stanza, dictating both topic and rhyme scheme. The singers ­were expected to act out the jíbaro persona —­ a clowning, straight-­ talking entity mostly performed by the male voice, with the female voice usually reproving of his ways. The pop­u­lar appeal of controversias could not have been lost on the advertisers who sponsored the programs (Colgate, in this case). The stage name Calandria (Songbird) referred initially to this character which she played on the Colgate Show, which they took from the stage name of the Cuban singer Nena Cruz, who had been part of the identical radio show singing Cuban country ­music (puntos guajiros) with Clavelito (Miguel Alfonso). (It’s worth noting the multiple singers were baptized as Calandrias at some point or another during their ­careers, for example, Rita Vidaurri in the ranchera tradition, Inés Arce in tango, and ­others we still ­don’t know about.) Jesús Sánchez Erazo, “Chuíto el de Bayamón,” who was by then an experienced hand in radio programming, was hired to play Clavelito. ­After this contract, Calandria kept the name artistically as she went on to a professional recording and per­for­mance ­career. She starred in other radio shows at the dawn of the 1950s, such as Alegrías campesinas (Country delights) and ­later in La hora del volante (The driver’s hour) with Ramito.7 In “La Calandria: An unforgettable sufferer,” an article published December 26, 2004, in Puerto Rico’s major newspaper, El Nuevo Día, Jaime Torres Torres wrote, “When Ernestina Reyes ‘La Calandria’ sang a seis or an aguinaldo, the patria [motherland] wept along with her, lamenting the fatigue, pain and frustration of colonialism.”8 His article, while well meaning (he describes Calandria as “one of t­hose minds that appears only once ­every four or five generations”), still draws from a problematic, gendered narrative: “Ever since her youth, misery and trou­ble hounded her. In spite of many divorces and failed loves, her successful per­for­mances and rec­ords earned her the rank of diva, heroine, queen and empress of country folklore, titles that she still holds.” However unintentionally, Torres Torres exhibits a regressive approach to Calandria’s musical ­career; he sketches the singer’s biography as a sustained failure. The hyperbole inherent in the succession of titles does not by itself tell us anything about the singer’s c­ areer or musicianship. Despite echoing earlier times, in which such hyperbole cemented illustrious personas and countered Techne and the Lady  123

the social belittling of jíbaros and their ­music, the repetition of hyperbole falls flat on our ears without careful unpacking and insertion into their listening context. Further, it reinforces the gender separation: the ideology of the g­ reat w ­ oman singer. Torres Torres concluded that “the so­cio­log­i­cal phenomenon known as La Calandria has not yet been studied in Puerto Rico as it deserves.” Although classifying her as a “so­cio­log­i­cal phenomenon” is overstated (substituting an individual for an entire society), he was correct in calling for her study. His final word on this “diva” is: “In between drinks, and armed with a guitar, Ernestina personified melancholy. Melancholy smiles at life during the day and consumes itself at night, while sobbing its pain away.” This characterization has two troubling aspects. First, it ascribes a melancholy mood to the singer (who, according to her closest associates, was anything but a melancholic). Second, it recurs to familiar tropes of artistic ­women as consumed by an unspecified bohemian lifestyle. A construction of ­women as downfallen, the need to keep girls u ­ nder tight and constant surveillance, mirror the strictures of Ernestina’s own life as a young ­woman in San Lorenzo. The linking of migration and melancholy disguises the stark decisions of the newly established ela. The economic planners of the new status knew that they could not create enough jobs for the total number of workers on the island. Thus they sponsored an unpre­ce­dented migration to the United States, especially to New York City. A large segment of the audience for country ­music was literally evacuated from the national territory. Si­mul­ta­neously, the state constructed a binary anchored in two interpellations —­ ­those who “stayed” and ­those who “left” —­ which stands as very unfair to the thousands of ­people who emigrated thanks to policies that squeezed them out of the economy. To allay the severity of its program, and aid in creating consensus, the state installed the symbolic Puerto Rican peasant and the Puerto Rican countryside as dyad in its my­thol­ogy of belonging, creating a “melancholy cage” to facilitate the state plan.9 In its personalization of a brutal, cold economic decision —­ its deployment of the illusion of caring for its suddenly incon­ve­nient national subjects —­ the state enlisted ­music in the campaign to induce compliance from ­those it had expelled ­under pretense of a bright economic ­future in the  U.S. city. The event of mass migration altered the course of country m ­ usic more particularly. The state manipulated jíbaro m ­ usic to correlate with its creation of new myths. It inserted country m ­ usic in a hierarchical relationship to the other ­musics it was promoting in Puerto Rico: on the one hand, classical 124  Chapter 3

­ usic via Operation Serenity’s venerable institutions (chapter 2), on the other, m pop ­music for tourists and the ­middle classes, including a type of nativist peasant ­music regularly featured on tv and in stylized revues in the capital city’s posh ­hotels. When Operation Bootstrap emphasized consumerism and modernity, requiring new musical formats to correspond to new cultures of taste on the island, the Puerto Rican folk genres of plena, bomba, and jíbaro ­music became explic­itly aligned with national-­popu­lar visions that rewrote ­music history as a racialized narrative of predominantly Hispanophile origins. The ela exalted the peasant figure and relegated Afro–­Puerto Ricans to a heritage role. Country ­music was routed into folkloric understandings of string-­based ­music, while Afro–­Puerto Rican m ­ usic was classified as rhythmic. Both occupied the lower rungs on the scale of musical worthiness, as defined by the state. Schools and the university taught this musical pedagogy uninterruptedly through developmentalism’s first phase (1950s and 1960s) and well beyond, into its decline (1970s and 1980s). In this pedagogy, both genres ­were esteemed as folklore, not as pop. While dominant visions coded both black and jíbaro as zoe and regarded their “bare life” as revealed in m ­ usic, state designs on jíbaro m ­ usic differed from official appropriations of black ­music (chapter  2).10 Compared to the Afro–­Puerto Rican subject, the symbolic country dweller lived on, however spectrally, while the descendant of slaves faded away as a relic of the past. What both raced imaginaries had in common was that both ­were expected to play a role in citizen identification with a dominant state proj­ect. In addition to the burden of repre­sen­ta­tion that constrained musicians, both genres suffered the fate of not being documented in all their breadth, since the focus of dominant interpretation became narrowly confined to substantiating the state mandate regarding national ­music. Classified as melancholic and lost, the thousands belonging to the working class and peasantry became removed from island listening cir­cuits. They forged new spaces for ­music making and vastly complicated the entire insular definition of values listening that the ela implanted. Jíbaro musicians ­were key in t­ hese articulations. Despite being participants in the state my­thol­ogy, and despite their considerable travails and the very real losses faced by individuals as they ­were uprooted and separated from Puerto Rico, jíbaro musicians and the migration at large creatively navigated this minoritarian space. Among the most aware of an alignment with the moment was Calandria, who first migrated to New York City in 1960. Techne and the Lady  125

Even ­under the auspices of the state, musical ­labor had been underpaid and hard to come by. Like Calandria, many jíbaro musicians migrated to New York City in the early 1960s and became icons for the mi­grant community. Some shuttled back and forth between New York and Puerto Rico over the course of the de­cade. Calandria was one of t­hese musical itinerants, with varying periods of residence between Puerto Rico and New York u ­ ntil she 11 settled permanently in the Bronx around 1970. In the words of jíbaro singer Joaquín Mouliert, “El Pitirre de Fajardo” (The kingbird from Fajardo), “Se dieron cuenta que había más todo para nuestra música” (They realized ­there was “more every­thing” for our m ­ usic).12 Following on Mouliert’s insight, this chapter seeks to address this “todo” (all) that musicians like Calandria accurately perceived. I go beyond the paradigm of mere economic need, which does not suffice to explain the magnitude of their artistic decision. Certainly the state showed a knack for manipulating culture to “educate consent,” but that’s far from the ­whole story, and maybe it ­isn’t the main story.13 Calandria’s musician’s desire —­ her devotion to jíbaro ­music, to her profession —­ impelled her to migrate along with her audience. She was adventurous and unafraid to venture out of all strictures, including that of the great ­woman singer.

CALLING ALL CRITICS The jíbaro (a difficult word to translate: peasant, farmhand, peon) has been, for de­cades, the foremost Puerto Rican national symbol. The ela implanted a fantasy of national meaning: life in the countryside, recast as peaceful and idyllic. On tele­vi­sion and radio, in school textbooks, in booklets the Division of Education for the Community (divedco) issued, all ­were hailed as descended from this mythical jíbaro and his way of life. The audio recordings and live per­for­mances of jíbaro m ­ usic, in which Calandria participated, played a crucial role in identifying with this abstraction. Puerto Rico’s “lettered city” worked discursively ­toward décima’s incorporation and of its presumptive practitioner, the jíbaro or farmhand of the countryside, as emblems of Puerto Rican difference. They waged their an­ ticolonial strug­gle primarily in the university and other, lettered venues.14 Poets such as Luis Lloréns Torres and Juan Antonio Corretjer sought to incorporate the jíbaro décima into cultured Puerto Rican poetry. Intellectuals from Miguel Meléndez Muñoz to Antonio S. Pedreira wrote treatises about the jíbaro temperament (as nineteenth-­century intellectuals had done before them, most notably Salvador Brau).15 Julia de Burgos, Puerto Rico’s esteemed 126  Chapter 3

poet, contributed her “Coplas jíbaras para ser cantadas” (Jíbaro verses to be sung) to the radio program La Escuela del Aire (The school of the air), a program similar to ­those found throughout Latin Amer­i­ca.16 In Puerto Rico, it was sponsored by the Department of Education (Departamento de Instrucción Pública) in the early de­cades of the U.S. colonial occupation of Puerto Rico. As a crucial ele­ment of its national-­popu­lar pedagogy, this entire corpus sought to translate the sound of jíbaro vernacular into print and elucidate the jíbaro temperament via language, through a cata­log of speech patterns, pop­u­lar sayings, and other such markers of jíbaro orality. Abelardo Díaz Alfaro, a staple of the public school curriculum, created a ­running series called Estampas de la vida de Teyo Gracia (Scenes from the life of Teyo Gracia), which became the standard text introducing the ever more modernized schoolchildren as well as elite nationals to the jíbaro. It was derived from a radio program sponsored by the Department of Education and aired on its radio station, wipr, beginning in 1951.17 ­Music was often used as a backdrop, and Chuíto el de Bayamón (who had starred with Calandria in The Colgate Show) performed décimas, reportedly at the request of Governor Muñoz Marín. Occasionally programs presented peasant musical practices (cleaned up, to be sure). Chuíto invited his jíbaro musician colleagues to perform with him on air, including La Calandria. Sadly, very few original recordings survive. ­Here is a typical excerpt, in its print version, from Alma Latina (Latinate soul) of November 15, 1962. It likely sticks close to the a­ ctual scripts of the program: “From such sadness, his sobbing, mournful singing arises; it’s like an audible heartbeat of the native bird. The jíbaro is afraid of what his singing portends. He heard this intimation the day he found his wife motionless on the cot, the day he had to take his son on his hammock to the town hospital, the day he took the el­derly ­woman’s corpse in a box to the town cemetery, which is like a field of crosses. . . . ​The jíbaro asks God for his mercy ­every time he hears the native bird singing.”18 Díaz Alfaro and other commentators offer a biopo­liti­cal assessment of jíbaro m ­ usic by affirming that the humanity of the jíbaro’s existence rests on his capacity to create ­music and by characterizing musical talent as innate to the peasant body. They place this singing jíbaro at exactly the line separating ­those who w ­ ill be “allowed to die” and t­hose who w ­ ill be “let live,” to employ the axiomatic Foucauldian formulation. This biopolitics extends to the stock instrument, the cuatro, as imitating the abject nature of jíbaro singing, as incapable of producing any other sound than ­those of the sorrow and resignation that comes from being at death’s door. With the example of Díaz Techne and the Lady  127

Alfaro’s Teyo Gracia series, we see how the state manipulated m ­ usic and singing to create a consensus that the jíbaro was better off with modernization, despite the loss of the natu­ral beauty in which he lived. This became a tenet of the ela’s official pedagogy. In this fantasy (­here I’m using “fantasy” in its psychoanalytic sense, as unconscious symbolic structure), the only remnant worth preserving as a kind of memorial to the countryside is ­music. ­Music becomes the jíbaro’s only creation and the sum total of his creativity. Other than ­music, he is definitely zoe, bare life.19 The ppd leader Luis Muñoz Marín (the most power­ful po­liti­cal voice in Puerto Rican history), almost single-­handedly created this myth of the jíbaro. He spoke of politics in the 1950s as a “jalda arriba,” an uphill trek, using a vernacular expression directly targeting the voters’ ears. (Most, at the time, ­were impoverished and functionally illiterate. In fact, the ppd anthem is titled “Jalda arriba.”)20 Notwithstanding the accelerated industrialization of developmentalism, Muñoz Marín called for the preservation of the “buen saber del jíbaro” (the jíbaro’s noble wisdom) and the spirit of the campo (countryside).21 This “buen saber” should be installed in the citizen psyche, and ­music did a significant share of this work. During the first half of the twentieth ­century, musicians participated in vari­ous radio shows across the island, showcasing “música de la montaña” (mountain m ­ usic), as jíbaro ­music was known in ­those early de­cades. For the ela at midcentury, ­music became a form of therapy, coinciding with the increasing professionalization of jíbaro musicians. On more than one occasion, Muñoz Marín, surely influenced by the pop psy­chol­ogy of the time, spoke of the populace’s need for solutions to the neuroses caused by vertiginous social change; he referred to this set of loose precepts as Operation Serenity (chapter 2).22 With ventures like the Teyo Gracia series on wipr and other such state-­sponsored media efforts, the ela arrived at the image of jíbaro ­music as somber and sorrowful, a memorial to life in the underdeveloped countryside that the ela purportedly saved peasants from. Despite the official, abstract admiration, societally speaking, jíbaros ­were close to being loathed. Their ­music was never truly exalted and it was not institutionalized like the literate musical forms that became the backbone of musical education in Operation Serenity (chapter 2). The ela did not invite the musicians to join the Escuelas Libres de Música (founded 1946) or the Conservatory (founded 1960) to teach their ­music. It was unthinkable to create a r­ unning festival of jíbaro m ­ usic to attract tourists and investors, like the Festival Casals. Jíbaro ­music remained confined to the unofficial pedagogy 128  Chapter 3

regarding the pop­u­lar, loosely presented in handbooks that cata­loged seises and recorded décima examples to suit the official my­thol­ogy only. Its full repertoire has not survived in the official rec­ord. Plainly put, the government did not take care of jíbaro ­music’s preservation as a musically valuable expression in its own, musical right. And since it did not overtly reject or censor it (unlike the reception of race rec­ords in the United States; I think of the vari­ous myths surrounding figures like Robert Johnson, or the deviant discourses attached to notable ­women blues singers), researchers lack a negative rec­ord to draw on to at least read against the grain. It’s crucial to unsettle the primacy of native, elite visions of jíbaro m ­ usic as the last word on its interpretation, starting with rejecting a static, millenarian rurality as its axis. David Monod asserts about another presumptive rural genre, the American blues: “Can the fundamentals of blues scholarship ­really be overturned . . . ​and are we ready for a thorough re-­assessment of the origins of the blues ­music?”23 While not discounting traditional ele­ments in the blues, Monod contests the idea that blues is a millenarian ­music and as such a vessel of timeless values, or that it is, in its strictest sense, only African American.24 In a similar vein, ­music critics should contest the ppd’s narrative of origins along with the idyllic vision of the countryside as an untainted space of rightful dwelling lost to modernization but that modernization should preserve in its “values.”25 Commercial jíbaro ­music began with the very first radio programs of the twentieth ­century and continued through vari­ous radio programs and eventually, tele­vi­sion segments. The ­music was able to survive the changes of Operation Bootstrap and thrive thanks to the vibrant soundscape in New York City and other cities where Puerto Rican mi­grants settled (such as Chicago) and in places far from the migratory epicenter of New York (such as Hawai‘i).26 The stylized costumes and learned mannerisms of many jíbaro musicians on tele­vi­sion and in concert catered to the colonial imaginary, but ­were in all likelihood received in multifarious forms by their audiences. We d ­ on’t know nearly enough about this reception. I’m certain that kitsch was sometimes received as precisely that —­ kitsch —­ and not always as a solemn, brooding, suffering statement on loss. The clowning attributed to jíbaro musicians, their celebrated wit, could also extend to their audiences. Although mi­grant loss is quite palpable in the adoration jíbaro musicians experienced while performing abroad, loss could coexist with savvy about cultural objects and their figurative function. The thousands of mi­grants ­were the audience for shows such as the ones memorialized in the marquee of Techne and the Lady  129

figure 3.1 ​Marquee of the Teatro Puerto Rico in the Bronx, New York, where scores of Latin American artists performed through the 1950s and 1960s. This eve­ning advertises El tribunal de la montaña, un sainete jíbaro (The court of justice of the mountainside, a jíbaro musical farce), circa mid-1950s. La Calandria was a regular at ­these shows. Courtesy of Grego Marcano.

Teatro Puerto Rico announcing a sainete jíbaro (jíbaro musical farce) and a program flyer for El Gran Show de Navidad in 1954, which include Calandria as a marquee artist (figures  3.1 and  3.2). Near the New York epicenter, the musicians played their m ­ usic live in Las Villas, the collective name for concerts sponsored by multiple businesses in the Catskills region of New York State, seventy-­five miles or so north of New York City, and at La Montaña del Oso (Bear Mountain), about forty-­five miles away. Buses carried mi­grants by the thousands to attend t­hese outdoor events. Calandria and her colleagues worked a steady stream of open-­air festivals between Puerto Rico and the mainland. They recorded 78 rpm rec­ords and eventually lps in Puerto Rico and the United States. Their 45s ­were constantly played in velloneras (jukeboxes) for collective listening and dancing. Their singles sold in the thousands. At a dizzying pace, jíbaro m ­ usic fast became an urban m ­ usic, as much part of the city soundscape as the Greenwich Village scene happening at the 130  Chapter 3

figure 3.2 ​Promotional flyer for Gran Show de Navidad (­Grand Christmas Party) at the Teatro Puerto Rico, Bronx, New York, circa mid-1950s. Calandria is featured with other jíbaro ­greats. Courtesy of Grego Marcano.

same time. Writing for New York, the Sunday Herald Tribune Magazine on July 4, 1965, Tom Wolfe described the “kind of invisible jíbaro universe that New Yorkers, even ­those in the ­music business, barely knew existed.” He continues, “Invisible! This is the ­great new age of troubadours, and the ­great new folk singers, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk . . . ​­they’re not ever anywhere ­because they are all hunkered down being au­then­tic.”27 Jíbaro musicians carried the aura of the big city all the way back to Puerto Rico, as Techne and the Lady  131

potently as the symbolic umbilical cord of the Puerto Rican countryside traveled to New York via their sounds. New York City sounds have been explored in myriad ways, including the 1960s downtown, Village scene; bebop; avant-­ garde experiments; and bugalú. Jíbaro m ­ usic, however, is summarily excluded from any account of folk ­music in the 1950s and 1960s city. If ­there are only outdated handbooks and a c­ ouple of studies of jíbaro m ­ usic in Puerto Rico, it’s fair to say that jíbaro ­music in New York is completely absent from the historical and musicological rec­ord, even though it enjoyed g­ reat currency in the diasporas of the 1950s and 1960s. Monod makes the point that the line between creation and commercialization in folk genres is quite blurry, and that commercialization does not equal falsity or adulteration but is part of pop ­music’s evolution and creative adaptation to formats of circulation and reception. What we think of t­oday as jíbaro ­music is a modern and, indeed, a pop ­music. This is not to affirm that it was not played in the countryside of Puerto Rico or that the rural way of life was extinguished in one fell swoop, or that some of the 1950s exponents ­were not members of rural communities. Yet while a good number of jíbaro musicians ­were raised in rural Puerto Rico, ­others belonged to a working class that was already urban, as planned and executed by Operation Bootstrap. Moreover, jíbaro musician entrepreneurship was clearly a quality the audience recognized and rewarded. The musicians used the available codes and adjusted to the market, selling authenticity at times and, at ­others, surely, dancing around its strictures.

­W OMAN, THE ALWAYS ALREADY ­ omen musicians navigated an extra layering of encoding and faced a much W more restrictive arena when it came to authenticity and its affordances (however limited). Within dominant discourse, symbolic womanhood appeared in multiple guises. In poetry and lit­er­a­ture and in po­liti­cal discourse, the patria (motherland) often was cast as a suffering damsel in need of a bard to save her (as is well known, Luis Muñoz Marín cultivated this persona of poet or bard in his po­liti­cal ­career). In nationalist writings, motherhood was the primary articulation of womanhood. The modern schoolteacher preoccupied intellectuals like Antonio  S. Pedreira. The new ­house­keeper was targeted in radio, print ads, and tele­vi­sion as the ideal consumer and blank slate on which to create pro­gress. The jíbara was ignored. She was a symbol of a terrifying nothing, portrayed much like her precursor, the peasant ­woman (in admittedly scant writings), as derelict or doomed. 132  Chapter 3

If the fantasy scenario never truly existed, gendered moral discourse provided its psychic grounding, a mea­sure for its impossible certainty. Benigno Trigo, a literary critic, has written about “the repre­sen­ta­tion of the ‘white’ peasant ­woman’s body as invaded by a curable disease,” a “figure to govern the colony” in early twentieth-­century Puerto Rico.28 Eileen Findlay, a historian, discusses how morality, as discourse, shifts and repositions itself continually according to vectors of race and class among w ­ omen in turn-­of-­the-­century Ponce.29 Ivette Rodríguez-­Santana, a sociologist, illustrates how the jíbara carries a burden of repre­sen­ta­tion in addition to that shouldered by the jíbaro, defined by the polarities of degeneration/regeneration, promiscuity/purity, rootlessness/fixity, infirmity/strength, antisocial/malleable, dangerous/­future laden. Rodríguez-­Santana demonstrates that gender is seamlessly integrated into the signifier that is the jíbaro (although gender is most certainly occluded symbolically).30 The esteemed historian Fernando Picó wrote memorably of the precariousness of country life and how w ­ omen (presumably jíbaras) w ­ ere continually in danger in Utuado, Puerto Rico; his book Los gallos peleados (Cocks locked in b ­ attle) defies any collective remembering of the countryside as a haven, even less so for ­women.31 Thus, jíbara musicians had few templates on which to base their staging of requisite authenticity, which created a peculiar space that was, to use the Lacanian formulation, extimate, included and excluded. Jíbara musicians ­were on the edge of both jíbaro ­music’s privileging of masculinity and class-­ based discourses about proper femininity, and on the edge of the racial constructions of jíbaros as white. Calandria is an example of a female body that proved difficult to classify racially. She was always described as a trigueña or trigueñona to me (brown skinned).32 Although in interviews I learned only a few details about Calandria’s m ­ usic making, I heard several times over that she was oscura (dark), clearly indicating she was not white and separating her from notions of the pure racial makeup of jíbaros.33 Silvia Álvarez Curbelo recounts that the ­music Calandria performed was seen pejoratively as “música de sirvientas” (maids’ ­music), approximating Calandria to the unacceptable class bios more than her male counter­parts, who ­were more protected from blatant characterizations of amorality, even though they shared a class standing.34 Calandria astutely navigated this extimacy and understood the contradictory affordances of the nothing. She played with the empty set of the female singer to disassociate her per­for­mance from the standards expected of ­women singers. This pro­cess took some time and was not linear. Nor did it arrive at a final, serene state of triumph. What I propose is not an exaltation Techne and the Lady  133

of the nonplace but an investigation into its productive density, accounting for the material and discursive difficulties Calandria faced for creativity and success. Visually, jíbara musicians w ­ ere less beholden to a fixed persona, as compared to their male counter­parts. ­There was simply no visual language for this figurative body or template for their persona. They could not carry machetes onstage, or comfortably wear the wide-­brimmed straw hat, the pava that shielded the farmhand from the bruising sun. (The pava had become a symbol of the ppd, so much so that the party itself came to be known as La Pava.) Admitting the existence of ­women’s ­labor as peons ran ­counter to their idealization in the new racial regime as faithful wives and selfless m ­ others.35 Figure  3.3 is Calandria performing the jíbara in the Teatro Puerto Rico, Bronx, New York, in the 1950s. This per­for­mance is in all likelihood very similar to the series of live per­for­mances in which the musicians participated in New York City as part of the state’s program to provide a cultural palliative for the trauma of migration. Calandria wears the pava, symbol of the jíbaro. She displays a wonderfully confident demeanor and obvious delight at the adoring feedback of her fans in New York City. We see a bohío (hut with a straw roof) in the left corner.36 A sunny sky with cumulus clouds and a con­ spic­u­ous palm tree to the right transmit the tropics, while a young boy is in charge of roasting a pig, apparently with no com­pany. The Puerto Rican flag is in dead center, sealing the paradisiacal, but oddly spare construction of the lost island. Jíbaro ­music always featured cuatro, guitar, and güiro, vis­i­ble in the photo. As it became recorded ­music, trumpets, bongos, and other instruments ­were added to evoke the commercialized, Pan-­Latino, ethnic sound that promoters and the recording industry desired. In this picture, we see a timbalero to the right and accordion and piano players to the left, signaling this commercial period.37 The principal symbols —­ backdrop, pava, and cuatro instrument —­ evoke images of the pre­industrial countryside, fast disappearing by the mid-1950s, supposedly built on traditional ways in which men and w ­ omen play out their natu­ral roles. The migration itself flew in the face of this fantasy, but demanded the fantasy nonetheless, revealing the importance of a psychic structure that bound them to the lost homeland. Like her counter­parts, through the act of singing Calandria portrayed this desired jíbaro of identification: a peasant figure, whose singing springs from ­labor in a close connection to the land. That this is a persona is obvious in Calandria’s case; she was from a small-­town working-­to-­middle class and her supreme desire was to pursue a 134  Chapter 3

figure 3.3 ​Calandria performing at the Teatro Puerto Rico, Bronx, New York, mid-1950s. The backdrop stages an idyllic countryside back home. Calandria wears the large straw hat known as a pava, which became a symbol of the jíbaro with the hegemony of the Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party. Justo Martí Papers, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, cuny.

­ usic c­ areer. All jíbaro musicians assumed this identity as their persona, even m if they happened to be from the rural areas. This d ­ oesn’t mean that they w ­ ere false in their pre­sen­ta­tion of patriotic feelings or yearnings for a lost homeland or countryside but points to a more intricate understanding of their self-­ presentation and theatricality. Calandria learned to convey the “rustic” via well-­traveled techniques of rasp and nasality; she also recurred to shrill tone, which sounded uneducated to the ­middle classes, a fact she must have been well aware of. What I’m indicating is that Calandria, like all good singers, deployed a technique that jíbaro musicians developed in their progressively professional incursions into ­music. Jíbaro artists underwent an accelerated education in poise and pose at the dawn of the 1940s and the early 1950s, in sync with the Techne and the Lady  135

a­ ccelerated industrialization program happening at the time in Puerto Rico. Just as all Puerto Ricans ­were expected to become familiar with pro­gress and its technology in vari­ous arenas (nutrition, literacy, baby formula, washing machines, and so forth), musicians had to come up to speed. In short order, jíbaro musicians became familiar with sound and visual technology. As they w ­ ere recorded, photographed, and filmed, they adjusted their up-­ to-­then unrehearsed and sonorous personas (they ­were only heard live on the radio and in live, community events ­until then) to assume fully modern musical personas, scripted in many instances, with a visual image and the ability to pres­ent a body that up to that point was graspable only through sound. In 1951 Calandria, along with Jesús Sánchez Erazo (Chuíto) and Florencio Morales Ramos (Ramito), who ­were, together with Calandria, already touted as the three ­greats of jíbaro ­music, participated in a brief, didactic movie made for tele­vi­sion by divedco. A seminal government agency that produced films, graphic art, and booklets targeted to the educational needs of the barely literate peasantry, divedco incited their participation in state campaigns of literacy and hygiene and tackled vari­ous social issues, including, eventually, migration (as seen in booklet no. 8 of Books for the ­People, “Emigración”).38 For Trulla (Impromptu Christmas party), the government enlisted the best jíbaro musicians in addition to the best jíbaro singers: Maso Rivera and Francisco Ortiz Piñero on cuatro, Felipe Rosario Goyco “Don Felo” on guitar, and Patricio Rijos “Toribio” on güiro. Most of t­ hese films had companion books released in conjunction with the new literacy campaigns of the ela, and vari­ous Christmastime booklets bore the same name, “Trulla.” One stated, “Vemos que el espíritu de noble alegría existente en el siglo pasado para la época navideña, sigue aún vivo entre nosotros. . . . ​Ni el tiempo ni el progreso han podido matar las costumbres buenas de nuestro pueblo” (We see that the spirit of noble happiness that existed a ­century ago during Christmastime is alive and well in us. . . . ​Neither time nor pro­gress have been able to kill the good customs of our ­people).39 The film’s setting re-­creates the porch of a traditional “casita en la montaña” (mountain dwelling). Trulla refers to Christmas ­music, played for the delight of neighbors and friends, in a surprise visit happening at any hour of the night. The short does not attempt to re-­create the liveness of a trulla, but it does seek to pres­ent it as a stock form of Puerto Ricannness, oscillating between the comical and the tragic. Its opening credits capture the moment when the musicians are tuning their instruments; they appear as professionals. The 136  Chapter 3

figure 3.4 ​Scene from the divedco (Division of Education for the Community, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) short film, Trulla, 1951, directed by Jack Delano. Calandria is seated between Jesús Sánchez Erazo, “Chuíto el de Bayamón,” and Flor Morales Ramos, “Ramito.” She sings a décima in a controversia with Chuíto.

artists look uneasy in front of the camera. They alternate between formality and slight amusement. Clearly they ­were instructed to act solemnly. One of the movie’s ironies is that very ­little of jíbaro ­music’s trademark witticism or continual banter comes through and nothing of its often rambunctious side. Chuíto goes first, prob­ably ­because he is the oldest. He sings a humorous décima, corresponding to his role as the trio’s clown. Calandria, who is seated between the two standing singers, assuming a feminine role, does not sing on her own (figure 3.4). Instead, she goes second, as Chuíto’s sidekick in a controversia about the differing natures of w ­ omen and men. She is the picture of concentration. In their décima, Chuíto sings of ­women as evil. Calandria sings about how it is men who are evil for forcing w ­ omen into certain be­hav­iors. Ramito, cast as the serious singer of the three, ends the movie with the third song, “Mi toro barcino” (My spotted bull), about the end of the estancias (plantations) in Puerto Rico. The last bars in the movie consist of this lament of both singer and mapeyé (the slow-­tempo, brooding melodic line of the cuatro, instantly recognizable to jíbaro ­music listeners): Techne and the Lady  137

Ya se acabó la abundancia, bendito hombre Y este dolor me acrisola Ya se secó la amapola Ya murió el buey que pitaba Murió el que lo pastoreaba Y quedó la estancia sola Abundance has ended, my friend And sorrow burns in me The flower dried up The ox that used to whistle died The man who took him out to graze died And the farm was abandoned ­ ese verses end the movie with gloom. The speaker includes himself in the Th stanza and names, in turn, ele­ments of the dilapidated landscape he surveys: flower, ox, and man, all aligned with literal death. Allegorically, they stand in for a larger sense of cultural dissolution. The stanza joins the scopic sweep to the sonic recapitulation of loss, signified by the mapeyé. The camera underscores this juncture offered by the décima, as it pans away from the singers and the scene fades to black just as the singer ends the song. In t­ hese early tv productions, the state began to disseminate the widespread construction of jíbaro m ­ usic as a mostly melancholy genre, as about the always already past. Jíbaro ­music changed from a traditional to an urban folk ­music ­because of the populist impulse of the ppd, and the musicians adapted creatively and intelligently to the reign of media. However, the complex meta­phorical and metonymical operations through which the jíbaro comes to stand in for authenticity became condensed in most accounts to an almost arrested insistence on the elegiac narrative. This is problematic in the case of all jíbaro singers but especially onerous for ­women, since their forced positioning in an earlier temporality (prior to “pro­gress”) entailed a double or ­triple fixity. In a sense, Trulla partakes of the “epistemological work of purification” that has so influenced the genre’s interpretation.40 Yet the eruption of the musicians on tv —­ their learning of the ways of the market and technology —­ is also a moment of new creativity. Trulla is a precious document b ­ ecause so few of the per­for­mances of jíbaro musicians are preserved for the historical rec­ord. It enjoys a new life as a YouTube clip with about 200,000 views as of this writing.

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Jíbaro song posed an inherent challenge to the industry’s manufacturing of fixity and the state’s injunction to remain immemorial, particularly charged to the symbolic ­woman that the jíbara singer should represent. First, it became, for all its touting as roots ­music, a ­music of displacement and migration. Second, while it was tethered, in official accounts, to orality (which, as Jonathan Sterne has argued, regarding Havelock Ellis’s influential theory, implements a “denial of coevalness” and mandates that the jíbaro live in a time preceding modernity),41 as a per­for­mance, jíbaro m ­ usic is characterized by its “verbal 42 art.” As such, it leads us squarely to voice’s presence in the ­music’s grain, what Roland Barthes famously theorized as the moment in which the bodily aspect of vocal per­for­mance is crystallized in the encounter between a language and the voice.43 This art began in “the times of Spain” but is always already an art of the pres­ent, an art of change. When I spoke to the trovador Joaquín Mouliert, he was quite serious in avowing allegiance to the ancient form of the décima, credited to Vicente Espinel (Spain, 1550–1624). However, his was not a ­simple imitation of the prestige of lettered forms but a kind of expression that had its own logic, not dictated by dominant culture. The sung décima is based on techne, skill. The challenge is to produce a perfect and if pos­si­ble dazzling and delightful sync between speech and the seis, showcasing the meeting between the singer’s voice and the words that (in theory) he or she must produce on the spot. To appear spontaneous requires an apprenticeship in ­music, despite the rhe­toric of innocence and good times and the use of place names and ­simple verbs, such as “to be” (ser and estar), as transparent allocutions of identity. Innate talent w ­ ill never be enough to create décimas; study and practice are required. Jíbaro ­music, at its best, provokes admiration for this virtuosic skill set. It is a verbal art but never identical to declamation of poetry. It is a dialogue with the seis line, in musical call and response to another master musician, the cuatrista. Popu­lar décimas are meant to be sung and require voice and persona. Calandria towers along with Ramito and Chuíto ­because she had the innate talent, put in the study and practice, understood the stage, and could hold her vocal own with the seis. Despite well-­meaning appreciations, she has never been granted this equality. Mouliert described Calandria as the most impor­tant exponent “en el sexo femenino” (among the feminine sex) of jíbaro m ­ usic’s techne, separating his evaluation of her prowess from ­those of male singers, who are always assumed to be superior to the entire group of female singers:

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Ernestina was the Golden Voice . . . ​a singer with such sweetness in her voice. She played a ­little guitar. She was not an improviser or songwriter. Priscilla [Flores] was more professional than Ernestina; she had more class. What Priscilla ­didn’t have was Ernestina’s bohemian disposition. Once Pagán [Herminio Pagán, Ernestina’s husband] and Ernestina arrived on a Thursday and left on Monday. It was the most beautiful weekend of my life. She loved the décima jocosa, the double entendre décima. Of all the ­women, she definitely was the one who recorded the most. Among the ­women, she definitely was the one who brought the décima to greatest heights.44 Flores (whose ­career, incidentally, Calandria helped launch) was an excellent singer in her own right. Compared to her, Calandria’s voice sounds less feminine according to dominant dictates, which may be what Mouliert meant by saying Flores “had more class.” Yet he may have also been describing Flores as appealing to bourgeois taste, whereas Calandria clearly espoused a working-­ class aesthetic in her persona. “Sweetness” is not ­really explained as such, but it is not an adjective that would first come to mind when listening to a classic Calandria recording. An impor­tant gender distinguisher appears to be the belief that Calandria was not an improviser, the highest standing among jíbaro singers, given the degree of difficulty and creativity required of improvisation. Some of her contemporaries have told me that she did improvise when the occasion called for it and even composed a handful of songs. By now it has been established among connoisseurs that few of the renowned trovadores actually improvised, including Ramito and Chuíto.45 Regardless of w ­ hether Calandria improvised, and sidestepping the debate on the absolute merit of improv in this genre, Calandria’s “greater heights” seem to be lower than the least of the ­great achievements of the male group of singers, improvisation or no. The philologist and folklorist Marcelo Canino, long the recognized authority on folk singing in Puerto Rico, mentions Calandria as the foremost female exponent of jíbaro ­music. He also relates, “Aside from singing décimas in singing duels, our female singers also interpret the traditional lyrical repertoire, known by all in our island. They likewise participate in public contests and competitions, and are members of native ensembles that play in dance gatherings. Above all, they are mostly heard during Christmas and Easter cele­brations, since, on the ­whole, they are true specialists in the divine topics of Nativity and Christ’s passion. However, even though they do not lack for

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feminine grace, our female troubadours have not achieved the absolute mastery of our male troubadours in the aforementioned traditional forms.”46 Jíbaro ­music’s gender discourse is difficult to navigate. W ­ oman could be the mea­sure of pro­gress or the mea­sure of the downfall caused by pro­gress; she could be the b ­ earer of purity, including linguistic purity, or the seed of all degeneration; she could be the loyal, faithful wife to a husband (no m ­ atter how philandering) or the vixen breeding way too many ­children and therefore burdening the ­family. An example of the imbrication between ­women and cultural degeneration and the need to prop up the jíbara as the stalwart upon which culture must depend (an example perhaps lesser known outside of jíbaro m ­ usic fan circles) is “Muriendo nuestra cultura” (Our culture is ­dying), penned and sung by José Ángel Ortiz, “El Jíbaro de Yauco.” It is one of the oldest of extant jíbaro recordings. Ortiz first praises Puerto Rico’s path to pro­gress, then illustrates the dangers of this pro­gress by recounting the sad tale of a f­ather who, intending to help his ­daughter as pro­gress recommended, paid for her studies at the university. All he got for his trou­ble was the d ­ aughter having a child out of wedlock. The ­father proceeds to give the ­daughter a beating and sends her off to New York City, since she has disgraced the ­family. Although the city offers many good ­things, the singer says, the ­daughter cannot ­handle the city’s licentiousness and comes back to Puerto Rico with “a dozen c­ hildren.”47 ­Woman is the mea­sure of Puerto Rico’s state of cultural degeneration in the face of pro­gress. Ortiz takes a swipe at university education and aspirations to enter the ­middle class, thus aligning the figuration of the jíbara with another figuration I alluded to earlier as a source of fear: the university-­trained ­woman, often a schoolteacher. Calandria’s incursion into ­music entailed entering the ­middle classes, as they ­were defined in 1940s and 1950s Puerto Rico. Recall how Carmen, her s­ ister, said that Calandria earned “more than a schoolteacher.” However, such ascension through pop­u­lar ­music was bound to be limited, as pop m ­ usic represented a hotbed of immorality for ­women. Calandria was associated with the bohemian aspect of jíbaro ­music in a particularly intense way. All ­women occupied this space almost automatically, as the negative of dominant visions of the jíbaro. As much as the male ideal was zoe (bare life), ­woman, bereft of a true symbolic encasing, emerged as a ­little too close to bios, a ­little too fond of sociality outside of any mandate. Jíbaro m ­ usic was partly acceptable to the dominant gaze b ­ ecause it strictly defended the policing of w ­ omen. Although jíbaro ­music is melodic, pleasant to listen to, often hopeful, and abundantly witty, we cannot forget that

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looming over this as well as other m ­ usics is the con­temporary real­ity of male-­ female relationships and the particularly vulnerable status of w ­ omen —­ symbolically, and also materially, and in the most urgent sense of personal safety and prospects of survival. The spaces of invention for w ­ omen singers mirror the prescriptions of this corpus, while male musicians enjoyed greater musical freedom without, it goes without saying, the weight of stigma. Compare “Muriendo nuestra cultura” to “Nací llorando” (I was born weeping), by the same songwriter, in an outstanding Calandria recording. ­Here Calandria occupies the masculine voice of the jíbaro singer, momentarily crossing gender bound­aries to assume the construction of the male as solitary, antisocial, distrusting, and surviving on innate guile. Nací en el mundo llorando Desnuda, yo se lo juro De madera en piso duro Como un reptil arrastrando I was born weeping Naked, I swear to you On a hard slab of wood Just like a slithering reptile This song, a soulful mapeyé like “Mi toro barcino” (My spotted bull), portrays the jíbaro singer and the act of singing jíbaro ­music more generally as a traversing of the t­rials and tribulations of life lived u ­ nder dire circumstances from birth. In tune with Ivette Rodríguez-­Santana’s Foucauldian analy­sis of the campo as a laboratory —­ not to defend from, but to create disease and decay, a frontier ruled by death —­ jíbaro singing is coupled with death and miserable conditions.48 Aside from the fact that it is men who sing in most recorded jíbaro m ­ usic, the mapeyé’s place of enunciation might also be seen as a space of the band of b ­ rothers of the defeated, a locus defined by the 49 melancholy male. The jíbaro voice in “Nací llorando” alludes to friendship but also to a fighting attitude in an existence dictated by turmoil and extermination. The ­human figure is zoe, bare life, naked. The song echoes Díaz Alfaro’s characterization of the jíbaro as zoe, of his singing as animal, as a reptile, correlating with Díaz Alfaro’s bird, resonating in turn with Calandria’s stage name of “songbird.”50 The repeated description of Calandria’s voice as “sweet” responds to t­ hese gendered coordinates, to the distribution of the sensible in jíbaro ­music.51 142  Chapter 3

Perhaps unconsciously, the insistence on sweetness sutures her gender difference and serves the purpose of separating her from that hallowed space of the trovador who improvises (a figure more than a fact among professional musicians, as is widely acknowledged ­today). In fact, her voice was husky, rough around the edges, at times shrill, at o ­ thers raspy, reflecting her musical decisions to inflect a given song with the appropriate tone and mood. Calandria’s timbre was immediately distinctive, marking her voice as singular and unpredictable. As Luis Miranda, “El Pico de Oro” (The golden beak), told me, “What was distinctive about her was her timbre.”52 Related to her impure class and racial status, she lent her voice and skill to discussions of purity in other realms, all of which correlated with the official mandate of purity that jíbaro ­music was charged with representing. One was language purity, a recurring topic of discussion. Following a trope of Puerto Rican lit­er­a­ture (the corruption of language in colonialism), Calandria recorded “Un jíbaro en Nueva York” (A jíbaro comes to New York) for rca Victor in 1947. The track features a young Calandria playing sidekick to Chuíto el de Bayamón, performing with El Conjunto Típico Ladí (one of the most respected bands of Puerto Rican pop­u­lar ­music at the time). It is, to my knowledge, her earliest recording. She asks him, in Spanish, how ­things are named and expressed in New York City, in the En­glish language. She challenges him on the grounds that he cannot improvise in the new language. Chuíto then sings brilliantly hilarious lines, playing his persona to perfection (of the witty jíbaro with innate, but not learned, knowledge). Although funny and dexterous, the track still leaves the young Calandria out of the space of jíbaro creation. She does sound muted and sweet (as in docile) in this recording, when compared to l­ ater ones. She has not yet developed her mature style, typified by a number of musical recourses to convey tone, rasp, and break. In “Ayer y hoy” (Yesterday and t­oday), of approximately 1952, Calandria sings a controversia with Félix Castrillón and El Conjunto Típico Ladí. The singers debate the merits of pro­gress from a gendered perspective, similar in content to the male speaker in “Muriendo nuestra cultura” but with distinct female and male parts reflecting contrasting, gendered voices. The male singer begins his intervention in the competition by defending the modern ­woman, singing, “Ella vive con soltura / ella misma se gobierna” (She lives relaxed / she takes care of her own business), insisting that she “trabaja y viste a la moda” (works and dresses fashionably) and even finds her own boyfriend and plans her own wedding. The young Calandria assumes the conservative position, defending the traditional vision of womanhood as upholding sexual Techne and the Lady  143

purity: “Porque en época pasada / la señorita o señora / no vestía como ahora / una moda exagerada” (In olden times, the w ­ oman, married or yet a virgin, did not dress like ­women ­today, too stylishly). Another controversia with Castrillón and Ladí finds Calandria defending the dark-­skinned ­woman, “la trigueña,” whose merits vastly outshine t­ hose of her competitor, “la rubia” (the blonde). Several singers recorded variations of the competition between rubias and trigueñas. “Trigueña” and “rubia” ­were not fixed feminine and masculine preferences. The singers occupy dif­fer­ent positions in each rendition. The recording I was able to consult is an earlier, Cuban version with Calandria and Clavelito, but we can safely assume the lyr­ics are similar if not identical. The two types, rubia and trigueña, represent ­women’s obfuscations. It is simply the point of view that gives them a negative or positive valence. The song is not a defense of any one type, or an affirmation of racial pride. Upon close examination, what is being debated is, once again, gender purity. It is w ­ omen’s temperament and their capacity to mold to consumer society. Calandria h ­ ere sidesteps the question of dominant morality into an affirmation of pride, but the terms of the entire debate seem spurious: whose body is the most attractive, who grooms herself better, who uses consumer products (beauty products in par­tic­u­lar) in the wisest fashion, and so forth. Calandria’s ­sister, Carmen Ortiz, recounts that ­after this song was performed, radio listeners ­were asked to vote for their favorite that day, the blonde w ­ oman, or the brown-­skinned ­woman.53 (Since controversias are essentially situational b ­ attles of wits, it could well be that Calandria performed as la rubia in some competitions, although her ­sister assured me she always sang the part of la trigueña.) I do not know the results of ­these competitions, but more likely than not, they varied. What was ­really being upheld was ­women’s positioning within consumer culture. In Clavelito’s verses, he ends up not even alluding to ­women, just store mannequins. The anticommercial pose of stalwart against mass production and forms of standardization regarded as inauthentic is presented against the backdrop of ­women as corruptors of men and society. Men pose as singers against financial gain, interested only in expression of feeling. Multiple publics, across communities and in this case, cities and territories, responded to the persona of the male folk singer as being personally sincere, un campesino de verdad, a true peasant. Si­mul­ta­neously, they held ­women and by extension trovadoras ­under constant examination.

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A TALE OF TWO PERSONAS Jíbaro ­music was not a ­music Calandria grew up with in her native San Lorenzo. She most likely sang boleros and rancheras when, as a child, she entered competitions on radio programs. She became acquainted with folk ­music on the radio and possibly danced to it in town gatherings, like many across Puerto Rico. ­After her debut in the Colgate Show with Calandria and Clavelito, she developed affection for and identification with jíbaro m ­ usic as a musician’s ­music, which became a genre thanks to professional musicians who created a rich and rewarding musical world along with their faithful, vibrant audience. ­These musicians, Calandria among them, ­were in sync with the moment and the market, capitalizing on the selling of nostalgia and authenticity during the 1950s. In ­these 1950s rec­ords, jíbaro m ­ usic circulated among city dwellers and was shared through rec­ords and other mass-­mediated technology. Most ­were released by Ansonia Rec­ords, a com­pany that, thanks to its huge cata­log, repackaged 78s into ­later lps with covers suggesting the tracks ­were new, and which ­later rereleased the vinyl a­ lbums as cds when the cd format emerged. We know precious ­little of rec­ord buyers and radio play in Puerto Rico; we know recordings ­were done in New York and Puerto Rico, and that small labels existed. Ansonia was by far the biggest. If we take only the Ansonia cata­logue as paradigm, recorded jíbaro m ­ usic might be interpreted as strongly retaining the associations with traditional folk ­music. Ansonia’s covers reflected images akin to the Bronx per­for­mance briefly examined through a surviving photo­graph: Men with machetes and pavas abounded, dressed in bright folkloric wear, with scarves tied around necks and sashes at the waist. Sometimes cocks, wheelbarrows, roast pigs, straw huts, and green mountains appeared as ele­ments in this construction of the au­then­tic jíbaro. Ansonia released Brisas navideñas (Christmas airs) as an lp around 1960, the year of Calandria’s migration to New York City. The lp’s temporal mix was enabled by new technologies that made pos­si­ble the transfer and remixing of 78 tracks into the “stereo-­like sound” of 33-1/3 rpm.54 The voice we hear is temporally separated from the voice we perceive in the a­ lbum cover art by a few years (figure 3.5). Calandria is decked out in a vaguely folkloric dress: a low-­cut, shoulderless shirt with a skirt. She smiles slightly and looks to the side, the picture of confidence. This portrait is meant to suggest every­thing ­women in folk ­music should stand for: a distance from glamour, a cele­bration of stock values, and closeness to the land (even if it appears figured ­here by Techne and the Lady  145

figure 3.5 ​Album cover, La Calandria, Brisas navideñas, Ansonia salp 1275, 1960?. The studio backdrop suggests a mountainside setting.

a tacky studio background). Calandria, as a jíbara, is tasked with projecting simplicity and lack of interest in worldly wiles or personal gain. She should be attractive, but somewhat comely, and never overtly sexual. The singer injects grace and a sense of cool into the portrait, striking a common pose of live, jíbaro per­for­mance, as if mentally composing or rehearsing her next intervention. She sports a slightly deprecating, faint smile —­ a smile of challenge. In the original liner notes, Herman Glass, Ansonia’s founder and owner, wrote: ernestina reyes, better known as “la calandria” is prob­ably the greatest of the female “Jíbaro” (mountain ­music) singers. Her fame has spread from Puerto Rico to New York and each year ­because of her popularity, she is invited to appear at dif­fer­ent theatres and clubs of this ­great metropolis. With each yearly appearance, the ovations given to her by the public become more and more sensational. . . . ​ 146  Chapter 3

It is easily understandable how la calandria has become one of our most loved “Jíbaro” singers. Her power­ful voice engulfs us with sweet and nostalgic tones. Sometimes, a huskiness in her voice ­causes a listener who might well be impervious to sentimentalism to concentrate on the artistry of this polished professional, to rejoice while she sings happy tunes, to be remorseful when she is crooning her laments. Glass acknowledges Calandria performing in New York as a fully professional musician; his description of Calandria’s voice is, though brief, more complex than is usual in con­temporary accounts. Although he has recourse to that neutralizing adjective “sweet” at first, he speaks of sweet tones, acknowledging the se­lection that all singers make when singing. Glass does not limit her voice and vocal per­for­mance to the stricture that w ­ omen’s voices must match societal conventions of femininity. He correctly describes her voice as “power­ful” and introduces the “huskiness” that made it resonate with the masculine sound of most jíbaro ­music. Her artistic difference from the lot of female singers kept it from being merely sentimental; she was focused on musical execution, the true residence of musical affect. Hence the adoration of mi­grants who, as I have suggested, ­were in the know about per­for­mance and persona and ran the gamut of jíbaro’s affective register. The Spanish version of the liner notes tames or elides Glass’s perceptions. Perla Pérez, their author, describes Calandria’s voice as “melodiosa y dulce” (melodious and sweet) where Glass had written that her voice was “power­ful” and had a “huskiness.” Glass described Calandria’s tones (which she chose in execution) as “sweet and nostalgic,” foregrounding her vocal per­for­mance. Pérez describes the tones as deep, speaking of “tonos más graves según la música que interpreta” (deeper tones called forth by the m ­ usic she is interpreting). She hesitates to describe the singer’s voice as deep, favoring the explanation that m ­ usic itself “authors” the per­for­mance heard on the rec­ord and sidestepping Calandria’s potentially unfeminine sound.55 The entire English-­ language section about sentimentalism and its limitations is ignored, as is Glass’s ending reference to the plea­sure audiophiles ­will obtain (he calls them “discriminating critics of folkloric m ­ usic”). Pérez’s ending address is more generic, to an audience of “lovers of the folkloric ­music of the beautiful island of Puerto Rico,” suggesting an in­ter­est­ing language politics in which English-­ speaking consumers collect rec­ords as an exercise in musical knowledge based on their distinction,56 while Spanish-­speaking followers listen to the re­ c­ord based on its capacity to convey the timeless connection to a native land. Techne and the Lady  147

The ­album proceeds along a domesticated narrative, tailored as much to insular Puerto Rico as to metropolitan Greater New York. Three tracks from the 1950s that w ­ ere repackaged for a dif­fer­ent type of circulation —­ inserted in a narrative of expulsion from Eden into the hard life of the city and ending in an affirmation of agency —­ might serve to illustrate the willful manipulation of the jíbaro repertoire in the market of nostalgia and begin to illustrate the way in which migration changed the ­music’s meaning and uses in the Puerto Rican context. The first is a lovely guaracha jíbara titled “Somos boricuas” (We are Puerto Rican), which reached the Puerto Rican Hit Parade. This song corresponds to the principal narrative of jíbaro m ­ usic, that is, the idyllic nature of the Puerto Rican countryside and the tranquil existence of the jíbaro before this way of life was uprooted. The first image is of the sunrise and the jíbaro heading to work. Images of work as conferring decency and providing happiness are reinforced by the presumed harmony between man and landscape. Puerto Rico is “mi” Puerto Rico, marked as a place of belonging by the fact of physical birth in the territory. The jíbara in this portrayal is in her proper place, the home, and she sets out to do h ­ ouse­work for the ­family. While the man is paired with nature in complete harmony, in the second stanza ­woman is paired with temporality, with the fixed nature of national identity. The years may pass, but tradition w ­ ill always rule, and the w ­ oman ­will always be pres­ent, washing clothes by the river. (The scenario was highly unlikely in the con­temporary economic situation, more typified by families broken apart by dire economic need and lack of social support networks. The state was literally phasing the working class out of the economy at an accelerated pace, which is the reason, as is well documented in history books, that the 1950s migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States took place u ­ nder government auspices.) The speaking subject in “La jíbara se va” (The jíbara is leaving), a hit when it was first released as a 78, employs a completely dif­fer­ent tone, expressing anger at being in the city and stating “she” ­will go back to Puerto Rico. The cuatro has picked up tempo and the tone differs from the placid contentment of “Somos boricuas.” This song revolves around ­actual anecdotes of life in the city, not an idealized rural landscape. It is unclear for how long or when exactly the singer is planning to leave New York (the pres­ent tense in Spanish is often used to indicate futurity). This plan might or might not happen. It could simply remain a wish, or perhaps a gritty urban lament, to share with equally disgruntled jíbaros in the city. The refrain, in a call and response with the other musicians, gives us a clue that leaving ­will be, at best, temporary (the refrain 148  Chapter 3

states that she is leaving to escape the snow). The song proceeds through four interventions by the singer. The first, above, is about cold weather and the discomfort of winter clothes; in the second, the speaker is horrified at the loss of identity signified by a jíbaro addressing another jíbaro in the street in En­glish (“How yu feel what yu say”); the third relates the presumed isolation of city life in the absence of kinship relations and the reciprocal hospitality of neighbors; and the final stanza enlists food as a marker of national cohesion, when the speaker complains that her friend Paquito did not offer her Puerto Rican fin­ger food when she visited his home (“cuchifritos,” recalling Myrta Silva’s per­ for­mance of the Rafael Hernández standard discussed in chapter 1). As we can readily see, the song revolves around anecdotes and not images. P ­ eople interact; some even have names (José, Paquito), while in “Somos boricuas” ­there ­were no ­actual ­people, just the twin, stylized images of an jíbaro and jíbara quite solitarily, even prophylactically encased in a picture-­perfect countryside. As far as we could tell, they had no neighbors or compadres to speak Spanish to, share home-­cooked dishes or taste cuchifritos with. Perhaps the sole advantage of the “Somos boricuas” jíbaro dyad was that they did not have to wear coats or endure cold weather. Ansonia did not include any controversias on this rec­ord. ­There is one song that presumes a male addressee and thus can be read in light of the themes of controversias and the structuring meaning that man-­woman relationships have in the definition of the national character, along with w ­ omen’s displacement and purity. It engages migration directly and is unabashedly self-­ referential: Calandria names herself as the subject who ­will migrate. The song is titled “El que se va no hace falta” (He who leaves ­will not be missed). The first two stanzas feature Calandria addressing a partner. She resolves to accept his be­hav­ior as a wanderer and home abandoner, the opposite of the idealized pair in “Somos boricuas.” The singer states that she w ­ ill remake her life, despite any “accusations from her f­ ather-­in-­law” (presumably that his son left her ­because she was an unfit wife and m ­ other). She also sings that she enjoys the support of her community, which comforts her by stating, in the refrain, that “he who leaves ­will not be missed.” Up to then, a generic w ­ oman had expressed the strength and resolve of the stock jíbara. The third stanza, however, jumps to a surprising, new referent in a song that had only addressed a failed love relationship: Sabrás que soy Ernestina Mejor dicho La Calandria Techne and the Lady  149

Pequeña cual salamandria Pero artista culta y fina Si a la ciudad neoyorquina Vuelo cual rápida carga Allí hallaré quien comparta Con esta humilde cantante Y aquí te diré al instante Que el que se va no hace falta Let me tell you, I am Ernestina Or better put, La Calandria Small as a salamander But a cultured and refined artist If I go to New York City In the blink of an eye I ­will find ­people ­there to be With this ­humble singer And this very instant I tell you He who leaves ­will not be missed In the third stanza, the singer herself becomes the one who w ­ ill leave and not be missed, as she speaks of her decision to migrate to New York and predicts that she ­will find a new life in the city as well as ­people to share it with. (At the moment of the recording, which happened earlier than the release of this lp, none of this was actually happening to the singer; it is a pose.) What interests me the most about this song is its meta quality as statement. Calandria sings, “I am Ernestina, or better put, La Calandria.” Naming herself, and describing herself as “artista culta y fina”(cultured and refined artist), her name is not that of an acquaintance (like José and Paquito in the previous song) but a figure, mixing in the trope of jíbaro humility with the assertion of musical mastery (the latter is also an impor­tant trope of this ­music). Musically, in the tracks gathered on Brisas and the other few dozen 78s Calandria cut in the 1950s, the change in her musical style from the very first recordings is everywhere in evidence. No longer “sweet,” she sings with full volume, employs the shrill tone and vocal rasp that would become her hallmark, and effectively embodies the lack of sentimentality or corniness, a fact that Glass remarks upon in his liner notes to Brisas navideñas. She delivers a viscous sound, thick, unruly, disobedient to convention, willful, full of body, hoarse,

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with more timing and sense of swing in counterpoint to the lines of the cuatro than the very first recordings discussed. With this vocal execution, Calandria inhabited the meaning making of jíbaro song, whereas in her beginnings she had been more of an echo chamber for the male word, for its log­os or authority. In an interview with Cristóbal Díaz Ayala, Mercedes Pérez Glass states that most of the Ansonia cata­log is música jíbara. Pérez Glass recounts that thousands of 78s and hundreds of lps ­were recorded, and that the 45 was mostly for jukeboxes.57 ­There was money to be made from jukebox sales. Billboard published a series in 1966 called “Money Programming”; in “All-­Alike ­Music in Latin Locations Is Loco,” Ray Brack recommends matching m ­ usic to the par­tic­u­lar Latino group that a given business caters to, using “imaginative jukebox advertising.” “This article suggests ways to win a loyal phonograph following in your Latin locations” (77). “Should your locations get good Puerto Rican patronage, you can offer folk ­music by Ramito (Ansonia Rec­ords), La-­Calandria (Ansonia) or the Cuarteto Mayarí” (86).”58 The sheer numbers Glass cites indicate Ansonia’s dominance of this ethnic market in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the musicians w ­ ere able to rec­ord with Canomar (the musician Piquito Marcano’s label) for about six years. We witness a new diversity of topics and playing styles that Ansonia, despite its status as the single most impor­tant venue for jíbaro recordings, might not have favored, since it catered so directly to the nostalgia market from the beginning. Figure 3.7 is an lp of approximately 1965, La Calandria canta . . . (Calandria sings . . . ​). The location of this photo is unknown, but it appears to be from the same photo shoot that produced the a­ lbum covers of two rec­ords with Ramito, Los dos gigantes (The two g­ iants) and Vuelven los dos grandes: Calandria con Ramito, vol. 2 (The two g­ reats are back: Calandria and Ramito, vol. 2; figure 3.8), ­albums dating from when both artists resided in New York and, importantly, which w ­ ere recorded as complete a­ lbums (not concocted out of remastered 78 tracks). Calandria’s persona is markedly dif­fer­ent from that of Brisas navideñas. In La Calandria canta . . . ​she strikes a completely bohemian note. The setting is bucolic. Dressed in modern garb, her pose suggests dreamlike absorption. In Vuelven los dos grandes, Calandria brandishes the guitar she holds in La Calandria canta . . . ​, as if ready to strike her colleague Ramito with it, while he, decked out in nativized jíbaro attire (contrasting with Calandria’s modern clothing) appears just as ready to teach her a lesson with his machete, feigning a stern macho look while touching her elbow. For this second cover, Calandria has donned a small pava to provide a feminine balance to Ramito’s

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figure 3.6 ​­Group picture documenting a musician’s gathering in the home of Pedro “Piquito” Marcano, Caimito, Puerto Rico, circa 1959. Calandria is standing third from left; Herman Glass of Ansonia Rec­ords stands eighth from left, near the center; and Piquito Marcano of Canomar Rec­ords is standing at far right. Courtesy of Grego Marcano.

masculine pose. In Los dos gigantes, Calandria and Ramito rest peacefully on the grass. Ramito is grinning and looking straight at the camera, while Calandria has assumed her aloof, bohemian pose once again, as if she had just released the guitar into his reassuring grasp. The pava now rests on the grass in front of them. The machete is laid casually over his body, comically suggesting phallic and also musical dominance (Ramito has also taken control of the guitar). Calandria, sans guitar, pava, or tree trunk props, simply is the absorbed figure in her dreamlike, feminine stance, a version of ­woman as enigma not matching Ramito’s jíbaro persona at all. Taken together, the three covers indicate fun and play. Nothing is taken seriously, and the gendered poses are clearly assumed as roles to be acted out in the m ­ usic, not as any true recommendation for everyday life. Still, the difference between the two artists’ poses is telling. Calandria seems to be situated visually between two irreconcilable poles. ­These covers show Calandria occupying the space of the bohemian singer and the jíbara si­mul­ta­neously. 152  Chapter 3

figure 3.7 ​­Album cover, La Calandria canta . . . ​ Canomar clp 511, 1960s. Shows Calandria out of the jíbaro persona.

Her vocal per­for­mance embodied ­these two opposing positions as well, at one and the same time. Notably, she is given equal billing with Ramito as a gigante and a grande. It ­wasn’t always the case that she appeared on the covers as a player equal to her two illustrious counter­parts. The cover for Ramito en controversia con La Calandria gives Ramito principal billing, and her name appears in the lower right-­hand corner only. Ramito is now playing the guitar, wearing, as usual, his jíbaro accoutrements. The most delightful detail of this cover is its Fillmore lettering and psychedelic design, with the pascua boughs typical of Puerto Rican Christmas standing in for the more American details of the Fillmore publicity. Although Ramito is the voice of tradition in the controversias he recorded with La Calandria, ­here his nostalgic re-­creation of the jíbaro persona is clearly offset by the decorative aspects of the cover, so U.S. pop. By contrast, on another rec­ord where La Calandria receives secondary billing and also d ­ oesn’t appear in the cover art, except through her name, Puerto Rico canta (Puerto Rico sings), with her other famed counterpart, Chuíto el de Bayamón, she appears suggested by an unidentified ­woman in the background, Techne and the Lady  153

figure 3.8 ​­Album cover, Calandria and Ramito, Vuelven los dos grandes, Canomar clp 513, 1960s. Taken during the same photo shoot as La Calandria canta . . . , ​Calandria now wears a small pava to mark her standing as jíbara.

standing by the doorway of a presumably jíbaro hut, calling out to her mate while he very conspicuously tills land manually in the foreground of the photo. ­Here the appeal is to tradition and the images that this m ­ usic is taken to evoke, of simpler times in the countryside. Is the unexamined, possibly unintentional implication that Calandria cannot be the jíbara who calls out from the hut to him in the picture (at once a soothing and demanding figure, typical of ­women’s presumptive double-­agent nature, but certainly very feminine in dominant terms)? On ­these rec­ords, Calandria may appear on one or two tracks only, as was the norm with lps of the time that mixed and matched vari­ous artists, even including ­people who ­were not billed on the cover. Perhaps ­because her timbre stood up so well to the voices of her male counter­ parts, ­because she infiltrated the masculine register dominant in jíbaro m ­ usic thanks to her wondrous ability to create a tough, uncompromising sound, Calandria was a favorite in male-­female controversias. Although she recorded impor­tant controversias with Chuíto el de Bayamón and Claudio Ferrer, for her most memorable controversias she partnered with Ramito. Calandria and 154  Chapter 3

Ramito recorded controversias about male-­female relationships, trading many a barb concerning their avowed sexual potency and options. (In one, “La finquita de La Calandria” [Calandria’s ­little farm] Ramito tells Calandria that her “finca” [farm] is no longer in working condition, while she accuses him of not being able to “soplar” [blow].) Undoubtedly they raised the roof in live per­ for­mances, which ­were much more obscene than any double entendre preserved in recorded ­music. Would that ­these live versions had survived in any form. As anybody who has attended live competitions knows, the audience typically responds to a set number of repertoire choices. The themes that stand out are the motherland, return, the flag, religious belief, the cantador or trovador mastery of the genre, and the contentious nature of man-­woman relationships, explored in controversias that can become as insulting as any game of the dozens, cut short when one singer accepts that the other has surpassed him in wit and style. I wish to call attention to three Canomar controversias from the early 1960s, when both Calandria and Ramito resided in New York City. I posit them as examples of the m ­ usic’s evolution and capacity for change. The singers debate the pressing issues affecting insular and mainland Puerto Rico: first, cultural assimilation, as in preferring cultural goods that are foreign to Puerto Rico (“Seis contra twist” [Seis versus twist]); second, language purity and the philological definition of nationality as being Spanish speaking and Hispanophile (“Dos idiomas en porfía” [Two languages do ­battle]); and third, the presumably American, individualist desire to make and spend money (“Ambición al dinero” [A passion for money]). ­These controversias depart from the genre’s established repertoire and offer us a vision of ­music’s incorporation of a new environment and the genre’s capacity to renew itself, especially when it comes to creating new lyr­ics, the backbone of jíbaro ­music as a verbal art. In “Seis contra twist,” Calandria chides Ramito for preferring native m ­ usic to the twist; she pres­ents as being “de la muchachada” (into youth culture) and claims, “No quiero lo de mi país” (I reject every­thing that comes from my country). Of jíbaro m ­ usic (“épocas pasadas” [bygone days]), she sings, “sólo queda un aleteo” (only a flutter remains) (not to be taken at face value, since the controversia they perform is, obviously, much more than a flutter and completely in their per­for­mance pres­ent). Calandria’s stanzas accuse Ramito of being old-­fashioned and resistant to change. With that, a challenge is launched ­toward the entire establishment of jíbaro ­music, particularly in its populist versions. Should the genre remain in a state of timeless purity? Could it survive? S­ houldn’t it incorporate the experience of Puerto Ricans Techne and the Lady  155

from something other than abjection, the evanescence or emptiness they w ­ ere called on to symbolize? Ramito’s stanzas accuse Calandria, in turn, of forgetting the Eden that they came from and abandoning their “música de cuerdas” (acoustic string m ­ usic) in f­avor of electric guitars and mainstream pop ­music. Amusingly, the cuatro —­ the instrument of authenticity in this m ­ usic, the veritable musical stand-in for Puerto Rico —­ embodies the controversia sonically by switching between seis and swing lines. This is possibly the first time a cuatro was recorded playing something other than Puerto Rican country ­music.59 In “Dos idiomas en porfía,” Calandria incorporates Spanglish expressions into her décima (“Whastsu ­matter con Ramito / You have prob­lem qué te pasa,” and “Listen esquius me Ramito / Yu crazy nada te escucho”) to exemplify the reverse of what she had embodied in the first rec­ord she appeared in, rca Victor’s “Un jíbaro en Nueva York.” Part of the intention is comical, positing the mi­grant who supposedly loses his language as buffoon. ­There is a self-­ deprecating quality in this and the other such socially oriented controversias that indicates that neither singer truly inhabits the polarized role they vocalize. Instead, they examine the real­ity that new, and sometimes pleas­ur­ able, ele­ments have come into their (musical) lives. Calandria plays the role of accusing Ramito, once again, of being ­behind the times and also of hy­poc­ risy. She sings that Ramito appears quite comfortable in En­glish when they are having a “plain old conversation,” the opposite of the disregard for En­ glish that he expresses when he is singing a décima. Ramito responds that he only speaks En­glish for practical reasons, that it is not a language of creativity or love. He equates Spanish with native instruments, such as the güiro, and claims he is “latino de verdad” (a true Latin male/national). The challenge is ­whether Calandria has ceased to be a true décima singer. Their exchange is playful and serves to acknowledge the new traditions of a new, mi­grant community, who ­will obviously use both languages, possibly for practical, everyday reasons at first but eventually in creative and personal ways. In “Ambición al dinero,” Calandria personifies materialist greed. Her desire to find a fellow male singer to together cultivate the décima is replaced by the desire to find a man who ­will fulfill ­women’s avowed addiction to consumption and expenditure. The female voice states, “Si en rica yo me convierto / Yo te aseguro coplero / Este cantar chacharero / Jamás lo volveré a hacer” (If I do become rich / I assure you, verse maker, / that I w ­ ill never again engage in / this pointless singing); the female speaker ­will renounce her cherished vocation as a jíbara singer in ­favor of riches (and, implicitly, a completely dif­ 156  Chapter 3

fer­ent way of life, having nothing to do with Puerto Rican official values). I ­don’t think any listener took this statement as a true expression of Calandria’s wishes; they knew it was unthinkable for e­ ither Ramito or Calandria to walk away from making jíbaro ­music. In ­these controversias, Ramito and Calandria exemplify how jíbaro ­music did not remain frozen in time. Ramito wrote the controversias, prob­ably in collaboration with Calandria, with some improvisation thrown in at the time of the recording. The verses imagine two highly gendered voices, as the male voice assumes the role of bastion of tradition and defender of native cultural values, while the female voice embodies the unexamined, pleasure-­ridden, live-­for-­the-­moment quality of the too-­quickly assimilated. It would be simplistic, however, to hold the singers to ­these notions. It would be inadvisable to take the conventions of this ­music as transparent discourse. Such a position would also not take into account the performative dimension evident in the recordings as much as the visual poses struck in their cover art, which, we can imagine, ­were even more salient in live per­for­mance, accompanied by the singer’s gestures, bursts of laughter, audience reaction, and, let’s not forget, food and drink. Back in Puerto Rico, jíbaro ­music experienced a kind of last hurrah in the 1960s, arguably the best de­cade for many jíbaro musicians who could be best described as active in two places si­mul­ta­neously. The city of Caguas, just south of San Juan, was especially welcoming to the jíbaro group. It boasted a strong jíbaro cir­cuit, including one of Puerto Rico’s most in­ter­est­ing grassroots cultural institutions of the 1960s. The Caguas bohemia, a group of local intellectuals, artists, poets, and surely a few dilettantes, gathered around the figure of Caguas native Ramón “Moncho” Osorio in his home in Caguas, Puerto Rico, ­ eople who frequented just south of San Juan.60 According to the testimony of p the cir­cuit in their youth, Calandria was its only ­woman member. Gilberto Almenas dates this group at 1965–1968; according to him, “it was a golden age for them,” during which they sang on La Montaña Canta (The mountains sing) radio show broadcast from Caguas (inaugurated in 1961), and performed regularly at the Rancho de Trovadores (Trovador ranch) in Guavate Reserve, where folks danced to their tunes. Almenas describes the group as “bien elegante” (well dressed, polished) and Calandria as “viva, alegre, habladora” (sharp, lively, talkative). During this time, jíbaro musicians enjoyed Operation Bootstrap’s heyday, its short-­lived plenitude. In the 1970s, they would experience Bootstrap’s downfall directly as a chronic lack of work for jíbaro musicians, who surfaced from oblivion only at Christmastime. Techne and the Lady  157

CIR­C UITS OF DEBT Traditionally, jíbaro singers include multiple moments of self-­reference and self-­expression in which they take as a topic their own importance and mastery as singers. The hyperbolic titles used as marketing devices —­ los maestros de los cantores (master singers), los decanos de los cantores (the deans of singing), los gigantes (­giants), los grandes (­greats), invencibles (invincibles), and so forth —­ stress virtuosity, in stark contrast to the ­music’s minoritarian status. The singer must always prove superiority, expressed by his or her capacity to deliver sheer personality and force through voice, poise, and successful manipulation of the genre’s staple themes. Two songs, prob­ably from the ­later 1960s, expand and transform t­hese distinguishing tropes. In the first, “La Peluya,” Calandria sings about the art of singing and her own place within the tradition of decimar (creating décimas). In the second, “La infortunada” (The unfortunate one), Calandria looks back on her life as years of torment.61 “La Peluya” sounds like a place name, but it is actually an off-­color pun on aw ­ oman’s sexual organs. In my ignorance, I asked Calandria’s ­sister, Doña Carmen, what it meant, thinking it was a place name of the kind that one encounters often in jíbaro m ­ usic. Laughing g­ ently, she explained that this was an obscene word, part of a game, used as in the dozens to insult another person’s ­mother, all in good cheer.62 I shook my head at how off I had truly been in my listening, simply ­because I completely missed the obscene pun. Calandria’s fast-­tempo, passionate per­for­mance is a dare to a number of interlocutors: other singers, the Catholic Church, broadcast media, other ­women singers. It is a defense of La Calandria against unnamed detractors or perhaps against the national morality so prevalent in her youth (and through the de­cades, if we take articles such as Torres Torres’s “Calandria: An Unforgettable Sufferer” as paradigmatic).63 I include the complete décima she delivers at full volume and with full vocal technique of rasp and break, and the deliberately slightly out of tune singing of jíbaro ­music: Yo canto por La Peluya Canto por el peluyón Y canto por el sermón Que dijo el cura en Jayuya Cuando yo empiezo a cantar Música de tierra adentro

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Soy más feliz y me encuentro Un tipo a quien vacilar En eso de improvisar No me gusta buscar bulla Pero si alguno me puya O en versos me desafía Si él me canta astronomía Yo canto por La Peluya En este campo señora Aunque malo se me tilde Quiero ser la más humilde De todas las trovadoras Son muchas las cantaoras De poca preparación Que van a televisión O a la radio a cantar prosa Y yo por cambiar la cosa Canto por el peluyón Yo en décimas por ejemplo Si nadie me obstaculiza Le canto hasta por la misa Del Viernes Santo en el templo Junto al trovador contemplo La Divina Concepción Y si por cierta razón Al coro se me ha invitado Después que el cura haya hablado Yo canto por el sermón Me gusta que el trovador Sea un sujeto apostólico Para entrar en lo católico Sin cometer un error Si es de la Biblia un lector Y si quiere que lo instruya Techne and the Lady  159

Yo canto por La Peluya Canto por el peluyón Y canto por el sermón Que dijo el cura en Jayuya I sing for the Peluya I sing for the peluyón And I sing for the sermon The priest gave in Jayuya When I start to sing ­Music from the heartland I feel happier and find A guy to poke fun at When it comes to improvising I ­don’t like to pick a fight But if someone dares me Or challenges me in verse By singing about astronomy I ­will sing for the Peluya In this field of ours, ­ma’am Although they might say I am bad I wish to be the most ­humble Of all the trovadoras ­ ere are a lot of cantaoras Th That lack preparation But go on tele­vi­sion Or on the radio to sing their poor prose But I, to change ­things ­here, Sing for the peluyón In my décimas, for example If no one gets in my way I’ll even sing in the ­temple For the mass on Good Friday With the trovador I ponder the Immaculate Conception 160  Chapter 3

And if for some reason I’ve been invited only to sing in the choir ­After the priest has finished speaking I ­will sing the sermon I like it when the trovador Is an apostolic type So we can get into Catholicism Without making a ­mistake If he reads the Bible faithfully And wants me to give him lessons I sing for the Peluya I sing for the peluyón And I sing for the sermon That the priest gave in Jayuya In the first stanza, the words “sermón” and “Jayuya” seem to appear strictly due to the needs of the rhyme scheme. They are loaded with meaning in this context, however. The sermon is clearly the most impor­tant discourse traditional jíbaros heard in any formal manner. Long before the government of Puerto Rico became or­ga­nized as such, jíbaros listened to sermons and paid heed to what the priest told them to do, more than to any official word from ­legal venues. The name of the ­Father, without a doubt, was the priest’s. Calandria ­here states that she sings “to pay homage to the sermon the priest delivered in Jayuya.” So far, the sense of the song is not altogether clear, although we know she is ­going to talk about her singing and why it happens. In the second stanza, she introduces the ele­ments of fun (“vacilar”) and sex (“un tipo con quien vacilar”). This activity is directly in opposition to the gravity of the sermon. She also qualifies her singing as “música de tierra adentro,” m ­ usic from the heartland. Now the place name Jayuya makes more sense, ­because Jayuya is the town in Puerto Rico that is located in the very center of the mountainous area of the island. As such, Calandria is locating her singing meta­phor­ically in the heart of the tradition, and staking her place as a full member. In the next three stanzas, Calandria sings of accusations against her singing (and her value as a person; recall that in this folk genre the two are taken to be the same). She says she ­doesn’t want to pick a fight (this is a convention of this tradition, as we have seen in the controversias), that she wants to be “the Techne and the Lady  161

most ­humble among all the trovadoras” (female improvisers), another trope. Then she states indirectly that she is not like the majority of ­these female singers, whom she in turn accuses of singing only for personal glory and gain (to appear on the radio and tele­vi­sion, and sing prose, not true oral poetry), yet another trope of this ­music. Calandria portrays herself as a continuation of the tradition that ­others defile by twisting its true nature. “Yo canto por cambiar la cosa, canto por el peluyón” (I sing to change t­ hings; I sing for the peluyón) might mean a number of ­things: She ­will not corrupt the genre, so she ­will go her own way; she ­will introduce innovations to the genre; she ­will not cave in to the expectations for w ­ omen singers, and ­will sing in the male manner (“peluyón” is obviously both an obscene superlative and a masculinization of “peluya”). In the concluding stanzas, the references to religion multiply. She sings that if no one gets in her way, she would sing the Good Friday Mass. Obviously, the Good Friday Mass is the most impor­tant Mass of the year. Th ­ ose familiar with the history of the Catholic religion also know that w ­ omen ­were strictly policed in the church. Calandria ­doesn’t stop with the sermon, though; she says she w ­ ill discuss the miracle of the Immaculate Conception, bringing the Blessed Virgin Mary into the mix and toying with an oblique allusion to sex. If someone has invited her to merely be a member of the choir (­because she is a ­woman, and possibly also a national away from home), she w ­ ill wait ­until the priest has given his sermon and then redo the sermon as a décima, the ultimate test of skill. The sermon is Log­os, supreme patriarchal meaning (as is the Bible or, more accurately, the exegesis of the Bible she sings about). Despite any obstacles, the singer w ­ ill demand her place in the creation of that meaning, which, in this genre, means the right to be considered a master of the décima, on equal footing with any male singer (“junto con el trovador”), with no holds barred in topic or style. In “La infortunada” (The unfortunate one), Calandria’s tone is vastly dif­fer­ ent. Jíbaro ­music possesses a true panoply of seises to correspond to subject ­matter, mood, and requirements of execution.64 This is a seis de San Lorenzo, named for the town Calandria was born in, which employs a moderate tempo. Jesús Sánchez Erazo, “Chuíto el de Bayamón,” is the registered songwriter, but prob­ably Calandria at the very least had a say in some of its lyr­ics, and in “La Peluya” too. Jaime Torres Torres cited this song as a source or document to substantiate his claims about Calandria’s misguided nature from birth and accelerated demise. In his opinion, the song was proof that Calandria lived out her years unhappily, mired in melancholy. As a kind of signature song, it does 162  Chapter 3

have self-­referential aspects, but perhaps not in the literal sense Torres Torres deployed. I cite the complete décima, whose melodious sound is dif­fer­ent from the preceding, employing Calandria’s more melodious tones: A ver si ya infortunada Soy desde que vine al mundo Y en el tormento iracundo Vivo triste y apenada Vine un día destinada Al mundo para cantar Pero al verme declinar En este valle de hastío Le dije a los ojos míos Ojos míos, no llorad [sic] Logré triunfar en amores Como toda una mujer Y en mis años de placer Viví mis ratos mejores Luego caí en los peores Días de mi desenlace Nada, nada me complace Desde que mi amor se fue Porque pierde hasta la fe El que desgraciado nace Los campos de San Lorenzo Me vieron nacer un día Y desde allí pretendía Surcar el espacio inmenso Más tarde me hallé en descenso En un mundo de insolvencia Y en mi infame de­cadencia Invadida por el llanto Yo dije en mi desencanto Lágrimas, tened paciencia Aún sigo siendo Ernestina Jíbara sanlorenzana Techne and the Lady  163

Y de mi garganta emana La música campesina Y aunque mi marido opina Que no he quedado indefensa No logro que me convenza Ni me arranque esta fachada Pues la mujer desgraciada Desde la cuna comienza Let’s see if I have been unfortunate Since I came to this world And lived sadly and full of regrets In this angry torment I arrived in this world one day Destined to sing But ­after seeing myself decline In this valley of tedium I told my eyes Eyes of mine, do not cry I was triumphant in love Like a real ­woman And during my years of plea­sure I lived the best of times But then I fell into my worst days When my life unraveled Nothing, nothing gives me plea­sure Since my love departed ­Because one who is born unlucky Loses every­thing, even faith The San Lorenzo countryside Witnessed my birth one day From ­there I believed I could Plough through im­mense space ­Later, I found myself declining In a world of debt And in my infamous de­cadence Invaded by my tears 164  Chapter 3

I said, disenchanted Tears, be patient For I am still Ernestina A San Lorenzo jíbara And jíbaro ­music Still flows from my throat Even though my husband chides me Reminding me it ­hasn’t been all that bad He ­hasn’t been able to convince me Or to tear away this pose For the ill-­fated ­woman Is so from birth ­ ere the female speaker espouses normative gender discourse and employs H traditional jíbaro musical tropes, apparently with no discernible irony, all the while singing peacefully, melodiously, although with a wonderful, expansive use of rasp. The lyr­ics literally state that ­women should remain in their place of origin and follow the trajectory that has been outlined for them; any deviation ­will entail moral lapses and therefore suffering. Such is the standard reading. In my reading, Calandria refers to the melancholy state of jíbaro singing, not to her own life. When she says she came into this world to fulfill her destiny, to sing, and then concedes that she declined, it is more likely she refers to her strug­gles to keep this ­music alive in the face of so much work (in other words, she refers to the precarious nature of singing jíbaro m ­ usic, as musical ­labor). She steers away from the moral consideration (that she was responsible for her personal downfall) to the larger question of the uses of the m ­ usic itself and her responsibility in keeping the national birthright alive (the verse “ojos míos, no llorad” [eyes of mine, do not cry] does not indicate quite clearly the object of mourning, but it occurs in a stanza about singing the m ­ usic of the countryside). As she sings in the décima, she was successful in love, had her moments of plea­sure, and is now reflecting on something larger, which is the singing she was destined to fulfill (“vine un día destinada / al mundo para cantar” [I arrived in the world one day / destined to sing]). In a gentle jibe at the narrative of ­woman’s triumph as being about securing a man, she even mentions her husband chiding her for her complaints. She concedes that in the face of economic hardship (“mundo de insolvencia” [world of debt]) she was almost Techne and the Lady  165

broken (“invadida por el llanto” [invaded by tears]), but then implores her tears “to be patient,” indicating that perhaps the end of the tale is not completely revealed during the singing. “Aún sigo siendo Ernestina / jíbara sanlorenzana” (I am still Ernestina /a jíbara from San Lorenzo) returns the singer to her roots before she left the island; “y de mi garganta emana / la música campesina” (and jíbaro ­music / flows from my throat) is a reminder, as much to herself as to the audience, that the ­music, the genre is not dead, despite the oblivion and selective commercialization it has suffered. “No logro que me arranque esta fachada,” referring to her self-­description as “unfortunate” as a “pose,” is a description of her pose of melancholy. It is not exactly insincere or a put-on; it is a real­ity that the conventions of this ­music making, and the fate of the genre itself, have cornered her into. “La mujer desgraciada / desde la cuna comienza” (for the ill-­fated ­woman / is so from birth) could be read as a fatalistic bow to the misogynistic portrayals of ­woman as Eve, burdened with sin since birth, but for me this is a misreading. “Desgracia” is a trope of fatalism seen often in décimas, not a personal statement of Calandria’s own disgrace. It can be read with ironic distance into an open-­ended conclusion, ­because the ending notes of the décima are not sorrowful or abject. Rather, they range from reflective to tongue-­in-­ cheek. In fact, one can hear an ever so slight but distinct chuckle at the end of some of the verses about misfortune. Calandria sounds contemplative, yet playful. She is illustrating how she had to negotiate vari­ous gender and genre expectations that ­were heavi­ly ­shaped by the historical changes the Puerto Rican communities, island and mainland, had been subject to. This could well be what “infortunada” means in this song. “­Woman” goes from being the placeholder of tradition to tradition’s most vile betrayer, since she is also modernity’s cipher. She is materialism and greed, and the polar opposite, infinite sacrifice and love. The song “La infortunada” illustrates the arc of this constant double positioning. I’m particularly interested in “insolvencia” (debt) as the key to “La infortunada.” Joaquín Mouliert opined that jíbaro musicians never did well living off their ­music, and suggested that only their supreme devotion to their art kept the ­music ­going.65 Ana María Ochoa ­Gautier has critiqued models of ­music per­for­mance that explain every­thing away with the culture-­as-­resource paradigm. She sets out to theorize the vast majority of Latin American musical ­labor within a matrix of debt as well as networks of reciprocity and solidarity that make pos­si­ble certain musical productions while not resolving single artists’ ­actual debt.66 Ochoa suggests that ­there is a need to better account for and 166  Chapter 3

theorize the “allure of art as beyond its reduction to a logic of expediency.”67 “La infortunada” speaks directly to the tension between the “allure of art” and the real­ity of debt, a point Torres Torres completely missed in his 2004 profile, when he employed this song as a biographical narrative about the artist that would confirm her misery, melancholy, and addictions. Most country musicians relocated to Puerto Rico definitively at the close of the 1960s, living out the rest of their days as symbols of the jíbaro, eking out a living as best they could in the l­ater, eco­nom­ically depressed times of the failed ela. Unlike most of her counter­parts, Calandria lived in New York during the 1970s and 1980s u ­ ntil her death in 1994. She settled in the Bronx with her husband, the Judge Pagán she names in songs. She continued her performing ­career when and where she could. She made the occasional trip to perform in Puerto Rico, particularly at Christmastime, when country ­music was in most demand as Puerto Rico’s values ­music. She appeared on tele­vi­sion shows during the holiday season catering to the nostalgia jíbaro ­music came to represent (such as the long-­running Tommy Muñiz show, Borinquen canta [Puerto Rico sings]). Irma Morales, “La Jíbara de Salinas” and Ramito’s w ­ idow, told me, “Ernestina se murió y nadie hizo mención de la muerte de ella. Todo el tiempo estuvo cantando su patria, su pueblo. Tenía una voz brillantísima” (When Ernestina died, no one mentioned her. She sang her mother­land, her ­people, at all times. She had a brilliant voice).68 Despite having attained unofficial status as the “folk diva” of Puerto Rico, she did not rec­ord very many new tracks. Long-­playing rec­ords compiled from her large output w ­ ere released regularly. A cartoon image of Calandria with a Puerto Rican pava, presumptive jíbara wear, and the cuchifrito (memorably exalted in Myrta Silva’s brilliant recording; chapter 1) underwrite twelve tracks of uninterrupted Alegres navidades borincanas (Joyous Puerto Rican Christmastime; figure 3.9). In another rec­ord, La Calandria Vol. 3, Ansonia reprised Calandria’s image in the earlier Brisas navideñas (Christmas airs), with the studio countryside replaced by a snazzy beach. This creates an odd juxtaposition between nativist and tourist-­attraction images, in her own body and the studio background, respectively. We can see that the cover of Brisas navideñas is the model for Calandria’s cartoon wear as the au­then­tic jíbara, albeit with the added pava and cuchifrito props. Ernestina Reyes con Mariachi is not a full mariachi rec­ord, as the title promises. Only one of the tracks is recorded with a Mexican folk instrumentation, “Respeta mi pollo” (Stay away from my cutie). The other tracks are selected from t­ hose she had recorded in the 1950s that ­were not jíbaro décimas but Latin American standards by renowned and Techne and the Lady  167

figure 3.9 ​­Album cover, La Calandria en alegres Navidades borincanas, Regio R 71, 1970s. The cartoon portrays Calandria in the commercialized attire of jíbaro musicians. Older recordings ­were rereleased during Christmas time to celebrate autochthony.

hugely pop­u­lar songwriters, including Rafael Hernández and Agustín Lara. The liner notes to Mariachi pair Calandria with the pueblo (­people) and their assumed simplicity, equating her singing with an unmarked realism of everyday life (targeting ­women consumers one would imagine, given the sentimental address). Two other rec­ords without any images of the singer (one showing the Three Wise Men, one a picture of a man playing a guitar with a tropical-­ looking ­woman beckoning a welcome over a pig roasting in a pit, an image used on rec­ords by other artists) associate Calandria with Christmastime (Christmas Party with La Calandria and La Calandria Wishes You a Merry Christmas). It is unknown if she was paid for any of ­these reissues of her recorded ­music. Other such compilations exist; ­these are but a few examples.69 One rec­ord, the 1977 La Calandria “En salsa,” contained new recordings (figure  3.10). This was a Christmas release that took advantage of the new sounds of salsa to revitalize the jíbaro genre, with remakes of old hits. The esteemed trumpeter Mario Ortiz recorded two such a­ lbums, one with Ramito 168  Chapter 3

figure 3.10  ​La Calandria, “En salsa,” con Mario Ortiz y su Orquesta, Borinquen adg 1322, 1970s.

and one with Calandria: “­These ­albums ­were due to the success of Bailables Navideños. Darío González, the owner of Borinquen Rec­ords, hired Dad [Ortiz] to produce t­hese ­albums of well-­known Puerto Rican folk singers. Dad was very good at arranging typical Puerto Rican Christmas songs. Dad had a passion for Christmas m ­ usic.”70 Obviously, the two folk g­ reats ­were enlisted to boost sales at Christmastime. Jíbaro ­music began its sad reduction to being heard only at Christmas. One song refers to Christmastime in New York City: “En la Navidad, señores / que pasamos en Nueva York / no es igual que en Puerto Rico / pero hacemos lo mejor” (Christmas in New York / ­isn’t the same as Puerto Rico / but we do our best). Other tracks revive the ancestral, peasant past: “Ya la Misa de Gallo va a empezar / levántate Juana / que las campanas repiquetean vístete ya / ve colando un poco de café / y avísale a Pancha / que la gente del campo va para la ciudad” (Midnight Mass is about to begin / get up Juana / make the coffee / let Pancha know / that folks from the countryside are starting to go to the city). The first example addresses the larger community; the second is particularized, addressing a ­woman, a comadre, Juana. In the first, the location is New York, the metropolis; the home Techne and the Lady  169

country, Puerto Rico, is named as the absence that gives sense to the endeavor of celebrating Christmastime. In the second, it is the countryside, standing in spectrally for the island of Puerto Rico at Christmastime. The most sacred of holidays, Christmas Eve, is the symbol of autochthony. One need only remember the dire situation of Puerto Ricans in 1970s New York City to understand nostalgia as a disavowal of the profound abandonment of the Puerto Rican mi­grant community by the very homeland it had revered for decades —­ a reverence fostered and sustained mostly through pop ­music. Jíbaro musicians’ relative success in the 1950s ­under the contradictory patronage of the ela and the recording industry shows that, like all successful professional musicians, jíbaro singers w ­ ere entrepreneurs who knew when and how to adapt to market niches. The de­cade produced a splendid body of recordings; the main resource at this point for the country ­music of Puerto Rico consists of this rich trove. I approached this invaluable archive with the caveat that it does not contain the entirety of the performed repertoire and that it tends to reflect dominant politics that created the jíbaro corpus as a perpetual elegy and statement of loss, aided by an ethnic niche market that profited handsomely from selling a somewhat facile, although deeply felt, nostalgia for the homeland. This dominant reception d ­ oesn’t ­factor in the spaces in which most recordings circulated, which ­were more communal than individual, more joyful than sorrowful. The last five songs discussed, “Ambición al dinero” (A passion for money), “Dos idiomas en porfía” (Two languages do b ­ attle), “Seis contra twist” (Seis versus twist), “La Peluya,” and “La infortunada” (The unfortunate one), recorded in the 1960s, are all examples of reworking classic tropes of the jíbaro corpus without falling into the mandated abjection of state-­spurred melancholia. This chapter specifically considers gender as a place to reconceptualize jíbaro ­music. Throughout the de­cades, mea­sured against female singers only (by her living colleagues and also by ethnomusicologists and aficionados of this ­music), the not-­so-­subtle implication is that Calandria is always already inferior to any male singer in the genre. Instead, she should be considered and clearly was received by the listening public as one of the very best: una grande, in the genre’s parlance. Calandria’s thinking voice points the way into the nothing of the historical rec­ord, on jíbaro musicians generally and ­women musicians especially. At times one has to do with nothing, one has to deal with nothing, one has to wade into nothing to divine t­hose nothings that are not empty. I have treated this nothing that jíbaro ­music generally, and Calandria 170  Chapter 3

specifically, have been consigned to as a clearing to reconstruct the event of voice in multiple displacements: of migration, temporality, and gender. Calandria dealt head on with the nothing to which she was assigned and her remarkable achievement is preserved in the “resonant tombs” —­ to use Jonathan Sterne’s beautiful phrase —­ that make up the jíbaro corpus.71 Sterne makes the following observation: “The phonograph as a way of preserving the dead: its contemporaries thought themselves brilliant and the invention wonderful for contriving such a possibility. Yet this peculiar construct of sound recording did not simply allow speech to live on forever: it essentially embalmed the voice.”72 Even though we would expect her to be the most symbolic of the three performers discussed thus far, given jíbaro m ­ usic’s heavy symbolic associations, she is actually more of a Benjaminian allegory (recalling his magnificent treatment of de­cadence, nature, and the distinctions between melancholy gazes in “Allegory and Trauerspiel”).73 Calandria’s vintage recordings sound like they ­were performed yesterday; sonically speaking, they are not caught in the trap of the old —­ even though, of course, they belong to the past. This multiple temporality is due in part to her per­for­mance and in part to jíbaro ­music’s consistent engagement with contemporaneity, despite being discursively and materially shackled with pastness. A listening public responds to nostalgia, certainly, yet satisfying nostalgia does not fully account for Calandria’s continuing relevance. Relatively recent cds, like Saludo a mi islita (A greeting to my island), and older vinyl compilations of oldies or ecos del pasado (echoes from the past) have by now become allegorical artifacts as well, transformed into downloads and streaming. ­Today’s listeners respond to Calandria’s artistry, the persuasion of her vocal per­for­mance, and continue to seek out the jíbaro genre, supposedly dead. This still-­relevant icon —­ with her voice, preserved from the 1950s and 1960s, yet juxtaposed with photo­graphs of the 1970s and 1980s —­ continues to traverse listening cir­cuits in new formats of circulation, demanding a restitution. She must be restored to cultural memory and receive the critical listening that has long been her due.

Techne and the Lady  171

FOUR

THE THINKING VOICE In the brief span of 1952–1968, Puerto Rico sped through its industrialization pro­cess. ­Middle-­class residential construction dotted the city of San Juan. ­Hotels replaced the mansions along its Condado waterfront. The spanking new Medical Center promised health for the sickly, undernourished population, a health that the developmentalist program of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico —­ Operation Bootstrap —­ desperately needed, as it endeavored to offer a cheap, obedient, and presumably bilingual ­labor force to American capital.1 The Golden Mile, a name for the financial district established in the area of the sometime royal hacienda, Hato Rey, emerged as the centerpiece of a new downtown. The mythical mall of Plaza Las Américas (formerly a ­cattle ranch that bred cows for the dairy industry) became the social hub of a polis that increasingly turned to consumerism for its exercise of citizenship. Newspapers and magazines ­were filled with consumer fantasies of ­every variety. Along with every­thing ­else that was dazzling and new, Puerto Rico consumed a new object for sale, the celebrity pop ­music star. Of the vari­ous pop artists that came of age in Operation Bootstrap Puerto Rico, Lucecita Benítez was possibly the most musically gifted and the most iconic. She entered the celebrity arena slightly ­after the peak of developmentalism, exactly before society’s steep and painfully obvious fall from its carefully crafted modernization fantasy. Her body’s hypervisibility through successive, iconic stages (the dashing auteur of the 1960s, the socially conscious artiste of the 1970s, the hyperfeminine diva of the 1980s) exists in contradistinction to the decline of the country’s dream of pro­gress. Yet, also in contradistinction to her mutable, celebrity-­dictated image, the constant in her ­career is the crucible that was her voice in Puerto Rico’s social history and ­music culture. Lucecita intuited the “thinking voice.”2 The thinking voice is an event that can be apprehended through but is not restricted to m ­ usic per­for­mance. It exceeds notation, musicianship, and fandom, although it partakes of them all. No

artist owns the thinking voice; it cannot be marshaled at ­will or silenced when incon­ve­nient. Its aim is not to dazzle or enthrall, although it may do so. Lucecita lived her long ­career negotiating the twists and turns of celebrity culture in late colonialism. Yet her endurance as a star does not result merely from successful navigation of celebrity and serendipitous coincidence with historical events. Her vocal phenomenon may be regarded as an unwitting out­maneuvering of celebrity culture whereby something resistant, the thinking in the voice, points to, as Jean-­Luc Nancy writes, “participation, sharing, or contagion” versus the “imaginary capture” of the visual, which has dictated the terms of the artist’s critical and pop­u­lar reception.3 Lucecita opened up the visual register dominant in celebrity culture to Nancy’s “resonance” of listening by orienting the listener t­oward the intangible sense of hearing through her multifold per­for­ mances across de­cades of Puerto Rican and Latin American life. This event of ­music, voice, and listening that is the thinking voice is repeated in other musical celebrity examples through time and space and possibly in nonmusical celebrity contexts where per­for­mance, voice, and embodiment are key. Lucecita’s reputation was made on her talent at delivering high melodrama. Her voice’s beauty, as well as her youthful good looks, perfectly suited the colonial fantasy of success through increased consumption. Artist lives w ­ ere favorite consumer objects in the 1960s, and Lucecita became the most appealing such object in mid-1960s Puerto Rico. Her many ­albums displayed the image of a beautiful w ­ oman through a pastiche of Eu­ro­pean and American models. Playing the vinyls on a portable rec­ord player magically conveyed the illusory confidence, even braggadocio, of Puerto Rico’s dependent, accelerated modernization. The principal fantasy of this time concerned the magical leap forward of an entire society into the m ­ iddle class, and m ­ iddle-­class taste reigned and determined print, aural, and visual expressive encodings in the late colony. Lucecita’s first moment of fame was when she starred in a youth show, El Club del Clan, a copy of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.4 Its theme song was a Spanish version of “Twist and Shout”: “¡Muévanse todos! ¡A bailar! ¡Vengan todos vengan! ¡Este es el Club del Clan!” (Every­one move! Let’s all dance! This is the Club del Clan!) Her first chart hit was the Spanish version of Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be with You,” titled “Un lugar para los dos” (A place for both of us). Lucecita was modeled ­after Springfield sonically and, to an extent, visually.5 This first ­album featured a mod cover with a composition of several Lucecita snapshots tinted in blue, yellow, and red strips (figure 4.1); the artist is fitted with a beehive wig (albeit not blond like Springfield’s but in the style of Martha and the Vandellas and other African American female stars). She is The Thinking Voice  173

figure 4.1 ​Mod ­album cover, Lucecita, Rico-­Vox rvlp 515, ­1964.

serially presented as pensive, playful, serious, accessible, and enigmatic. She is photographed with a guitar in three of the frames, showing some skin in the second shot, holding the guitar up in the fifth, and strumming in the eighth. Significantly, none of the photo­graphs feature her singing. The song “El Club del Clan” is the first track of Lucecita’s second ­album, ¡En escena! (Onstage), which included Spanish versions of “Hello Dolly,” “Walk on By” and a track that remained on the Puerto Rican charts for two months in 1965, “Vete con ella,” a Spanish version of the ­Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love.” The Spanish lyr­ics transformed the song from a happy paean to marriage to a challenge from a jilted lover, daring her lover to go with “the other ­woman.”6 Lucecita wears a wig, as for her first a­ lbum, but the visual reference now turns more clearly to early Motown, most obviously the Supremes but also other artists in their stable such as Stevie Won­der, Marvin Gaye, and Tammi Terrell (figure 4.2). As with early Motown rec­ords, the frame underscores the subjective view of a listener/viewer, the plea­sure of listening punctuated by the artist smiling, and the artist’s face framed by her semioutstretched arms, with hands pointing upward. The colors, a blue-­green pastel for the background and pink for her dress with ruffles, suggest respectability and pointedly avoid unruliness. 174  Chapter 4

figure 4.2 ​Motown-­style ­album cover, Lucecita, ¡En escena!, Rico-­Vox rvlp 519, 1964.

The visuals contrast with the first track, which was a hit on Puerto Rican radio. Musically, it is delightful to hear the singer in “El Club del Clan” d ­ oing her own take on the John Lennon per­for­mance classic of “Twist and Shout.” Although she did not leave her voice “in shreds,” as Lennon famously did, she used vocal rasp throughout the entire track, sounding muscular and masculine. In “Vete con ella,” by contrast, Lucecita’s per­for­mance is touchingly lyrical, with a sweet tone in the m ­ iddle register interrupted by minor vocal breaks, sprinkling small doses of melodramatic sobbing and whispering. She was essaying a feminine sound, and the effect is markedly dif­fer­ent from the ­Dixie Cups track. Lucecita’s version hints at dissolution, not plenitude, not merely ­because the song’s Spanish lyr­ics ­were plainly the opposite of the En­ glish. Lucecita was sonically trying on melodrama for size. As with many other tracks on her first rec­ords, Lucecita is overdubbed harmonizing with herself and is also heard in all background vocals. The youth female audience was the target audience of El Club del Clan and its noon spinoff, Canta la juventud (Young p ­ eople sing), with its catchy groove: “Aquí les canta, les canta la juventud / ye ye / la juventud / ye ye / la juventud / aquí les canta, les canta la juventud / la juventud que viene aquí para gozar” The Thinking Voice  175

(The young p ­ eople of Puerto Rico sing now for you, the young p ­ eople who are ­here to have fun). The producers reasoned that ­there could not be too many male stars, while they needed only a single w ­ oman star so she could sell to what was regarded as a limited market for female youth singers. Lucecita quickly eclipsed the other artists in the stable, outselling them all. She was about twenty-­five years old when she appeared on the show; however, she was made up, dressed, coiffed, photographed, and other­wise instructed to act as if she ­were much younger, in her teens (“We outfitted her with wigs b ­ ecause wigs ­were in fashion then, and we dressed her in s­ imple clothes, so she looked like a girl”).7 Seen mostly in feminine garb, her image suggested innocence and unspoiled or untainted beauty. Her naturalness, of course, was a technology of the self, carefully crafted to match industrial capitalism’s notions of the gendered and youth consumers. Lucecita’s voice did not fit as easily into the Club del Clan mold. Other than the superficially linguistic or cultural differences that distinguished t­ hese early copies of American youth culture on the island and across Latin Amer­ i­ca (­there ­were a number of “Clubes del Clan” shows in multiple countries),8 a more profound difference ensued, less easily mapped but discernible with critical listening, which escaped Lucecita’s man­ag­ers and market demands and ultimately wrested her signification from the entertainment world that was forming in 1960s Puerto Rico. She had a magnificent vocal instrument, far superior to your run-­of-­the-­ mill pop artist. In the liner notes to Lucecita’s first ­album (figure 4.1), her first man­ag­er, Alfred D. Herger, had promised: ¡Es Lucecita de Puerto Rico, Lucecita de América! The most thrilling female voice to come from Latin Amer­i­ca in a long while, Puerto Rico’s Lucecita . . . ​a ballad singer of genuine, vibrant feeling, of direct and honest expression . . . ​singer, dancer, composer, musician (folk singer, rock and roller . . . ​) —­ all that is this girl, and more . . . ​a multiple personality that belongs to a multitalented artist. . . . ​ Seeing her on stage, or just listening to her rec­ords gives you the thrill and sheer emotion of facing a truly ­great artist —­ you immediately recognize that this young lady has “It,” plenty of it. . . . ​May we pres­ent to you a ­great talent discovery: Lucecita.9 Herger’s description was not hype. He had been truly impressed with Lucecita’s vocal prowess and her capacity to sing multiple genres, all extraordinarily well. He was right: She had “It.” Lucecita was a virtuoso singer with sweep176  Chapter 4

ing range and extraordinary power. Her diction was flawless. Her timbre was hauntingly beautiful, like a reed instrument, from bassoon to flute, alternatively dusky and bright. Most of all, her deep register was truly wondrous and unique in the constellation of all Latin American and Spanish-­speaking singers, not just ­women. The ­album liner notes give the impression that Herger had discovered Lucecita and developed a raw talent out of scratch, but she was a working artist by the time she signed with him. As with other artists hoping to make it, she first competed on the radio show Buscando estrellas (Looking for stars), singing the bolero standard “La barca.” According to the artist, Piquito Marcano (who had the label Canomar, discussed in chapter 3) also produced shows in New York City in addition to ­running his rec­ord label and working as a musician himself. She recalls her professional debut in the Teatro Puerto Rico in the Bronx: I was 15 years old and this guy goes to see my m ­ other, and tells her he wants to take me to New York to sing. My ­mother said I could not go b ­ ecause I was a minor, and on top of that my ­father was not around. . . . ​But since I had an aunt who had lived all her life in New York, my m ­ other thought of saying, “I ­will let her go if she stays at my s­ ister’s ­house.” And so I went. I played guitar; I had no musical accompaniment. Imagine me, all alone in that theater, with thousands and thousands in the audience. . . . ​Can you believe who I debuted with, without even knowing! Celia Cruz, Rolando Laserie, Marco Antonio Muñiz, and Armando Manzanero when he was still only a pianist.10 In figure 4.3, she is seen on this trip with Rolando Laserie, Celia Cruz, and Lucho Gatica, in 1962. “I was the new girl on the show and that’s how they presented me, as the new girl. I was referred to as Luz Esther; Lucecita had not yet been born. Consider my debut: a theater filled with five thousand ­people, with ­those four monsters. All alone, as a minor, playing my own accompaniment on guitar in four songs. And the audience gave me a standing ovation! It was incredible.”11 While she scored many melodramatic hits, Lucecita did not rec­ord only melodramatic ­music. One of her greatest hits of this early stage was “Sobrenatural” (Super­natu­ral), and when she performed this song she shimmied ­after the dance crazes of the 1960s, completely with the times. But this level of comfort with global youth culture does not resolve the disjuncture between The Thinking Voice  177

figure 4.3 ​Group picture of, from left, Rolando Laserie, Celia Cruz, Lucecita Benítez, and Lucho Gatica, Teatro Puerto Rico, Bronx, New York, around 1962. Courtesy of Grego Marcano.

the singer’s “girlie” position in iconography of the time and the decidedly male position of the speaker in “Sobrenatural.” This separation is humorously apparent in the only movie Lucecita has starred in, El curandero del pueblo (The town healer, 1969) alongside Adalberto Rodríguez, “Machuchal,” one of Puerto Rico’s best-­known comedians (whose persona was based on a comic interpretation of the Puerto Rican jíbaro as buffoon). Machuchal was always caught between tradition and modernity. In this movie, he is the town healer who, in an implausible plot turn, truly the stuff of fantasy, enrolls in a nursing course in Puerto Rico’s newly inaugurated Centro Médico (Medical Center), one of Operation Bootstrap’s mea­sures of pro­gress. Nowadays the Centro Médico is a symbol of failed bureaucracy and the severe shortage of health care in Puerto Rico. In the movie, it appeared as awe-­inspiring modernity, 178  Chapter 4

Bootstrap’s crowning achievement, just like the youth female star, Lucecita Benítez. Both the medical establishment and the modern artist, the movie implies, are hip yet humane. The hospital is so modern it w ­ ill admit a man and country bumpkin to its nursing program. Lucecita, playing herself, refuses her (fictional) ­father’s desire for his ­daughter to go to medical school, in his footsteps; a modern ­woman should make her own choices, and her character pursues her dream to be (of course) a singer. A broken leg momentarily derails her, thus bringing her into contact with Machuchal as his patient in the hospital. Midway through the movie, Lucecita receives word that her new release, “Sobrenatural,” has just hit the stores. Cut to a nurse excitedly delivering the rec­ord. Cut to Lucecita barking the order to play the 45 for her fictional, shades-­clad boyfriend. Cut to the best scene in the (admittedly mediocre) film as Lucecita lip-­syncs and shimmies while the boyfriend character distractedly gazes upon and smiles at the spectacle of a hospital cafeteria full of dancing nurses, smartly dressed in perfectly ironed uniforms and classic nurses’ caps. The film offers visual and sonic proof of ­woman as modernity: the new professional ­woman, symbolized by the nurses, the attractive yet enigmatic singer shimmying, and the 45 emitting the voice that insists: Yo quiero, yo quiero saber Si en la tierra puede haber una mujer Pues te oí, canturreando una canción Tarareando una canción Y tú tienes que ser Sobrenatural I want to know, I want to know If ­there can possibly be a ­woman on earth ­Because I heard you singing to yourself Humming a song You must be Super­natu­ral The excerpt shows how the addressee becomes unclear when the gender of the singer goes slightly awry. The speaker is addressing not merely a w ­ oman but a ­woman who is singing. When Lucecita sings t­ hese lyr­ics, she veers t­oward a forced narcissism, underscored by her framed youth in the mise-­en-­scène and the societal fantasies of the nymphet that Herger tried to fit Lucecita into. The Thinking Voice  179

Lucecita could very well be addressing her own status as a societal fantasy in the track, constructed by vari­ous technologies, in the hyperbolic mode of the song presenting as “super­natu­ral.” Lucecita’s mouthing of the lyr­ics to “Sobrenatural” intimate a gender ambiguity expressed in sound. Lucecita has remarked, “I was the first rock artist in Puerto Rico,”12 placing herself ahead of any male counter­parts. She simply was peerless. No voice, male or female, was like hers. As the only ­woman in the Herger stable, she occupied dominant femininity uneasily from the start, occupying vari­ous male-­dominated formats in m ­ usic. Fi­nally, her queerness was a source of fascination, without a doubt, despite the repeated attempts to domesticate her image by finding her a boyfriend.13 The soundscape in Puerto Rico included a mix of pop songs coming from multiple markets, as seen in the Hit Parade listing of 1967, with “Sobrenatural” coming in at number 9 (figure  4.4). Lucecita’s single shares the top spots with five Spanish-­and four English-­language hits. “Sobrenatural,” despite being a Spanish-­language hit, is as close to the American and British hits as to the other hits in Spanish, maybe even more so. It belongs squarely to the internationalist pop of the time. A very short recording with plenty of studio sound, it features fast-­tempo string embellishments and bass line in the beginning, reminiscent of James Bond movie ­music. By overdubbing Lucecita harmonizing with herself in the chorus, the track foregrounds advances in recording technology as they became available in Puerto Rico. Although the tune is a short, bouncy, rock-­and-­roll song, the effect, when compared to tracks recorded at the same time in Puerto Rico by other female pop artists, is a ­little unsettling. The first glimmerings of a thinking voice surface in this early repertoire.

AUTEUR, ARTISTE Lucecita’s most impor­tant track of the 1960s is undoubtedly “Génesis,” a ballad that haunts the Puerto Rican collective memory to this day. ­Under contract to Alfred D. Herger, Lucecita competed in the first edition of the Festival de la Canción Latina (­later renamed the Festival oti), held in 1969 in Mexico. She was a member of the Puerto Rican cohort. Lucecita handily won the first prize for singing, while Guillermo Venegas Lloveras, also Puerto Rican, won first prize for songwriting. Puerto Rico experienced t­hese first prizes as an apotheosis. Throngs greeted the singer at the airport; schoolchildren watched her arrival on tele­vi­sions brought into the schools; newspapers documented 180  Chapter 4

figure 4.4 ​The Hit Parade of Puerto Rico as reported by TeVe Guía, December 23–29, 1967. Lucecita’s hit, “Sobrenatural,” comes in at number 9.

a parade for her through downtown San Juan. Lucecita met with the leaders of the two dominant po­liti­cal parties, Governor Luis A. Ferré of the pro-­ statehood party (the New Progressive Party) and Senator Rafael Hernández Colón (then president of the Senate, he was l­ater elected governor as the candidate of the pro–­status quo Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party in 1972, defeating Ferré). Neither politician wasted the opportunity to be photographed with the star nor to appeal directly to the public’s heightened affect. “Génesis” correlated with both the fear of annihilation that the Cold War implanted and Puerto Rico’s colonial anxiety over its smallness, which became more intense as the cracks of a failing economic miracle started to show. We sense musical overcompensation in its fully symphonic, semiclassical arrangement and wall-­of-­sound recording, with bombast to spare. “Génesis” alludes to the destruction of the world from its first verse (“Cuando nada en la tierra quede que tibie el sol” [When nothing is left on Earth to feel the warmth of the sun]) and ends with an image of love’s survival, as a flame g­ ently rising from the disaster (“Solo habrá una lumbre y esa será el amor / ¡El amor, el amor! ¡Para empezar!” [­There ­will only be a flame and that flame ­will be love / Love, Love! To begin again!]). The lyr­ics’ stark portrayal of the immediate f­uture runs head-on into the orchestra’s musical embellishments (recalling Hollywood movie m ­ usic) and the artist’s elaborate melodramatic singing. Anyone with access to the Internet can witness the magnificence of the singer’s voice and her spectacular per­for­mance onstage four de­cades ­later, thanks to YouTube (figure 4.5). Lucecita’s per­for­mance of “Génesis” catapulted her into celebrity status beyond Puerto Rico, providing a blueprint for f­uture Latin American baladistas (including the 1970 debut per­for­mance of the Mexican pop idol, José José, who, barely a year l­ater, sang “El triste” with similar pomposity and symphonic accompaniment, as well as a ­Little Prince costume). Lucecita was key in the transition from the bolero’s dominance to that of the balada starting around this time. Lucecita’s per­for­mance struck a disquieting, dissonant chord. The public marveled at her bravura but was shocked by her masculinity; the Mexican press commented on her masculine wear and hairdo, and gossip about her sexuality soon followed in Puerto Rico.14 ­After four or five years of pleasing images meant for ready consumption and singular per­for­mances that did not strike a nerve in the social fabric, Lucecita’s first moment of artistic maturity surprised every­one. This icon clearly did not conform to the well-­honed imaginary of the Ca­rib­bean ­woman ­either visually or sonically, as it had been drawn in campy ste­reo­types of dancing bodies since the classic Ninón Sevilla 182  Chapter 4

figure 4.5 ​The auteur. Lucecita Benítez performing “Génesis.” Primer Festival de la Canción Latina, Mexico City, 1969. Costume designed by Martin.

vehicle Aventurera (1950). Certainly, Lucecita’s costume, a native version of the Yves Saint Laurent female tuxedo, helped capture the public’s imagination.15 Lucecita sported a boyish look reminiscent of Italy’s Rita Pavone, who was all the rage. Pavone was prob­ably the model for Lucecita’s new look, but ­there are no apt models for her vocal per­for­mance. She had spoken of learning to sing by listening to Lucho Gatica’s rendition of the classic bolero “El reloj.” Contemporaries, in part encouraged by Lucecita’s man­ag­er, compared her to Olga Guillot, sometimes accusing Lucecita of imitation. She possessed a dif­fer­ent instrument with a wider register and rock-­stadium power. She had truly let it rip and initiated an auteur phase in which she began to identify with the predominantly masculine position of the songwriter. Part of her transgression involved her incursion into realms of meaning reserved for the male creator. Lucecita’s per­for­mance of “Génesis” remains disturbing and nonnormative, despite being her ticket to a celebrity beyond 1960s covers of U.S. and Eu­ro­pean pop hits, and being remembered as a moment of pride for Puerto Rico. In 1969, Lucecita’s star body, already a veritable Deleuzian assemblage, was forever altered by the eruption of a thinking voice and proved capable of truly rattling Latin Amer­i­ca’s long fascination with queer stars only as the confirmation of naturalized, nationalist gender roles.16 Lucecita triggered the The Thinking Voice  183

work voice can make us go through, calling forth what Mladen Dolar invokes when he writes of the voice as a “bodily missile.”17 This voice showed at the moment where bounty of talent coincided with the uncanny alignment of celebrity culture with global danger and colonial and neo­co­lo­nial shifts, when masculine embodiment erupted through the conventional, fashion-­driven vehicle of celebrity in modernity’s periphery (with its grossly uneven distribution of capital and its increasing emphasis on commodified symbolic culture). Lucecita illustrated what happens when a singer embodies meanings and anx­i­eties of the arkhé, sometimes at odds with her individual intentions or desires, due to the crossing of enormous talent, commanding stage presence, and an uncanny capacity to be photographed and visually reproduced that few singers achieve. The contingency of the historical times infused a certain anima or spirit into ­every object associated with her. This young ­woman was read in masculine key, but we do not know exactly why. Was it the volume of her voice, or the narrow reading of her costume? Was it her hairdo, which was the global rage but might have read other­wise in Latin Amer­i­ca? Or was it the vehicle of the international song festival itself, that 1960s creation for investment and tourism at the peak of the Cold War, catapulting her first persona of the masculine auteur into the world scene with a song that certainly did not resemble the typical feminine fare? On the cover for the single “Génesis,” the artist smiles at us, and the print informs us that the song won first prize (figure 4.6). Nothing more. She had arrived at the scene, but she could not be interpreted yet, thrusting her, as a subject unmoored from common social coordinates, into a simulacrum of Americanist unity smack at the apogee of the Cold War. Not only via the lyr­ics of “Génesis” but also through this simulacrum, she became inextricable from the void —­ which, far from removing her from meaning, welded her ­career to meaning making.18 Although Alfred D. Herger negotiated the contract that took Lucecita to the Festival de la Canción Latina in 1969, Lucecita signed with a new man­ag­er, Paquito Cordero, shortly ­after.19 Tomás Figueroa was Cordero’s point man for his ­music artist contracts. Figueroa hired Pedro Rivera Toledo, who had arranged “Génesis,” as Lucecita’s ­music director. Rivera Toledo influenced her sound decisively, showing a preference for busy arrangements with plentiful embellishments and many instruments. Several lps followed vertiginously on the heels of Lucecita’s 1969 triumph, that same year, all with suggestive covers fully exploiting the artist’s iconic, queer appeal. The rec­ords capitalize on the persona of a misunderstood, off-­kilter creator. They exploit Lucecita’s gender and racial ambiguity to the fullest. They emphasize melodramatic singing.20 184  Chapter 4

figure 4.6 ​Single of “Génesis,” 1969. rca Victor 3-10397. The festival winner was contracted to release the winning song as a single.

Th ­ ese lps of her auteur phase would not have worked without the artist’s genius, particularly her vocal pyrotechnics, steering the rec­ords away from the rush to capitalize on her “Génesis” triumph as much as pos­si­ble. Although her first rec­ords are disdained by many a fan as being inauthentic, light fare, and although ­there ­were prob­lems with management’s stifling of Lucecita’s gender difference, their infantilization of her, and what some critics see as a whitening of the star body, the production values ­under Alfred D. Herger ­were higher. The auteur phase did generate several striking images in ­album covers. Lucecita en Acción . . . ! (Lucecita in Action . . . !) portrays her with her eyes shut and mouth agape, as in a state of corporeal trance (she was well known for her dramatic gesturing at the time; figure 4.7). The signifier “Lucecita” begins definitively separating itself from the machinery that attempted to simply manufacture a female youth star (the smiling young ­woman, suddenly the pride of her country, poised to attain world fame). The singer is still a surface, a mirror that invites us to share in the moment of vocal plenitude, what Mladen Dolar calls a viva voce, that which cannot be archived.21 Playing the rec­ord yields diverse tracks that d ­ on’t necessarily coincide with the singer’s The Thinking Voice  185

figure 4.7 ​­Album cover, Lucecita en acción . . !, Hit Parade hpst 045, 1970.

visual self-­presentation. Her autonomous sonic concept begins to appear in Lucecita en la intimidad (Intimate Lucecita; figure 4.8). A collector’s item, audiophiles esteem this rec­ord ­because they classify it as serious. The cover pres­ ents us with an image of docile introspection, tantalizing the viewer with the chance to reencounter an unadulterated sonority symbolized by the image of the artist strumming a guitar. The visual plays with prior sartorial signs of the artist’s masculinity, as does the inclusion of the instrument. As a degree of surveillance started to creep into Puerto Rican social life, Lucecita’s offstage conduct, from her dress, to where she went, to how she behaved started becoming an object of scrutiny in a far more serious way than that exhibited at first by overzealous fans. The worry had to do with gender and racial normativity, obviously. More specifically, the artist symbolized gender and sexuality in an altogether unpredictable way. Vocally, she had begun to represent voice’s “attack,” the very possibility of disordering and convulsing societal desires without containing precise, settled meanings.22 Only a few months a­ fter her triumph in Mexico, in 1970, Lucecita inaugurated her second iconic moment. Fashion, to which the artist’s body so naturally took for the camera lens, prob­ably led her and her team to the African 186  Chapter 4

figure 4.8 ​­Album cover, Lucecita en la intimidad, Hit Parade hpst 040, 1970.

or Afro look, as it was called at the time. In Lucecita’s my­thol­ogy, this change was about black pride, social justice, and control of her image. It was about snubbing tv producers and radio’s infamous payola.23 Yet all artists in a celebrity culture must engage in multiple negotiations to stay at the top. We are not privy to the contents of any such negotiations in Lucecita’s ­career, or to the artist’s interiority. The consensus that Lucecita grew into an enlightened black identity, discarding an inauthentic 1960s celebrity as a whitened, oppressive image, may occlude the complexities of Lucecita’s c­ areer as well as her mercurial personality and star tendency to speak in the terms reserved for divas, a discourse that can be delightful but is hardly ever transparent. The Afro and the tux cohabited uneasily during this artiste period. As of this writing, readers with access to YouTube can see three early 1970s videos of Lucecita in her tuxedo.24 Together they exhibit disparate deployments of this costume. Lucecita appeared on The Ed ­Sullivan Show on December 6, 1970; the clip is now captioned “Puerto Rican chanteuse croons out tune in Spanish accompanied by her own conga player.”25 (The drummer was not her own player but the Cuban master Cándido Camero, who worked u ­ nder separate contract.) ­Sullivan announces: “And now, assisted by Latin American drummer Candido, The Thinking Voice  187

figure 4.9 ​Lucecita performs “Todas las mañanas” in the Mexican movie Tonta tonta pero no tanto (a vehicle for the Mexican comedy star María Elena Velasco, “La India María”). Lucecita wears a red tuxedo top and her Afro, 1972.

­ ere is one of Puerto Rico’s most exciting performers, Lucecita Benítez. . . . ​So h let’s have a fine welcome for Lucecita Benítez!” Lucecita cut a handsome figure with her Afro and green Fernando Martin tuxedo outfit.26 She appeared in Tonta tonta pero no tanto (I may be dumb, but not that dumb, 1972), a María Elena Velasco vehicle (the comedian was in character as Mexico’s buffoon, La India María). Lucecita performs the same song, the bouncy “Todas las mañanas” (­Every morning). This time she dons a red tux jacket and black bow tie, along with her Afro (figure 4.9). The third clip, from 1972 or 1973, shows Lucecita singing “For Once in My Life” with Sammy Davis Jr., prob­ably on the ­Toyota Rambler Show (a Paquito Cordero Productions show, which aired on Telemundo, Paquito Cordero’s tele­vi­sion station).27 Lucecita sings a Spanish-­ language version to Davis’s En­glish. Although the artist clearly enjoys her banter with Davis and matches him in cool, she appears Afro-­less and slightly more feminine looking, as it was coded at the time. Reportedly, she left the ­Toyota Rambler Show, which she hosted, ­because she was dissatisfied with the commercial inclinations of her man­ag­ers, who 188  Chapter 4

injected ele­ments of dissonance when they aided her per­for­mance in the market and proceeded to eliminate them at a moment’s notice at the slightest hint of a loss of viewers. Lucecita has said that she could not tailor her own image as an artist and was fast becoming weary of recording only for hits and sales. The sartorial tug of war mirrored, to an extent, the sonic pastiche of the rec­ ords of this second iconic phase, tenuously held together by the artiste pose Lucecita was able to assume thanks to her extraordinary vocal ability and virtuosic dexterity with a plurality of genres. The artiste manifestation allowed her to comply with her man­ag­er’s demands to appeal to multiple markets. This included adding several English-­language songs to her repertoire for her ­hotel shows, to cater to American tourists as much as the local bourgeoisie. Her man­ag­er’s tastes and the constant use of polls to gauge market success dictated the production values of the rec­ords. At times she sported her Afro, at o ­ thers not; at times she wore the tuxedo, at o ­ thers she dressed in ruffles and was heavi­ly made up. She was required to change styles, and her repertoire was, for the most part, mandated. The lps Hit Parade numbers 60, 61, and 70 are all titled, simply, Lucecita. Their covers feature portraits that directly reference black identity, focusing on her upper body and therefore skirting the issue of the problematic tux. The three lps w ­ ere recorded in Spain with mostly Spanish personnel. The second ­album has a terrific cover that is, in some ways, more unsettling than the other ­albums that portrayed Lucecita with an Afro. The cover features a single photo of Lucecita (by Gabriel Suau) repeated across the a­ lbum, guiding the viewer’s eye from left to right and down two rows ­until the eye meets the same photo in negative for a single frame, then to return to the color photo (figure 4.10). It is a close-up of the artist with a faint, knowing smile. While sporting the Afro, her image is not constrained by the imperative to represent; the repetition of the frame, as well as the presence of the single negative frame, emphasizes the image quality of the portrait, its status as an artifact of photography and specifically as a portrait of a pop artist —­ ideally a changing object, never a monument. It is perhaps obvious, but needs to be stated, that the cover is playing with the black/white binary, while not resolving it ­either way. It offers, perhaps, a commentary on the public’s by-­then obsession with Lucecita as a racial sign. In Benjaminian terms, the cover deflates the image’s auratic character, making it equal to the dozens of pretty photos that had by that time been taken of Lucecita, all produced with the speed that the cover itself re-­creates in its dizzying repetition of the frame, all for mass consumption. It is a comment on easy iconicity. The Thinking Voice  189

figure 4.10 ​­Album cover, Lucecita, Hit Parade 61, 1972, showing a repeated color close-up of Lucecita with her Afro, and a single, negative exposure in the second row. Photo­graph by Gabriel Suau.

The fact that the image is a close-up of the artist plays with the idea that close-­ ups and a gaze at the camera lens equal sincerity and readability. Close-­ups ­were a standard feature of film and tv melodramas. ­Here, the close-up is borderline defiant. The image is certainly very distant from the octane-­charged, melodramatic explosion of Lucecita en Acción . . . ! or the soft, ­simple intimacy of the artist strumming a guitar, with her back to the camera, head slightly turned to the side only allowing a partial view of her face, in Lucecita en la intimidad. Lucecita’s star body evolved in artistic duress, u ­ nder fire as vari­ous sectors competed for the symbolic space in the increasingly mediatized society of the spectacle.28 Of the three a­ lbums recorded in Spain in Lucecita’s artiste phase, with her Afro as main visual signifier, Hit Parade 70, Lucecita stands out for both scopic and sonic reasons. The graphic artist Antonio Martorell created an intense ­album cover, representing Lucecita with her Afro, in the nude, with arms outstretched, using red and blue to create a power­ful and alternative image of the star body in a racist, homophobic, sexist, and classist society (figure 4.11). The first track is the hit song “Soy de una raza pura” (I belong to 190  Chapter 4

figure 4.11 ​The artiste. Cover of the ­album Lucecita, Hit Parade 70, 1973. Cover design by Antonio Martorell.

a pure race) —­ like “Génesis,” a watershed recording and classic of the Puerto Rican late colonial soundtrack. Tele­vi­sion scholar Yeidy Rivero has offered an inaugural analy­sis of the Afro’s social significance and shock ele­ment.29 Rivero focuses on the “Afro look controversy” between 1970 and 1973. Referring to a “televisually constructed whitened body,” Rivero posits that the artist was whitened by the use of wigs throughout the 1960s and that up to the moment when she wore the Afro, which Rivero locates on tele­vi­sion in April 1970, Lucecita functioned as an acceptable feminine rock-­and-­roll female star.30 She writes, “The Afro . . . ​completely destabilized her —­ ­until this point —­ racially, socially, culturally and somewhat acceptable whitened trigueña/mestiza televisual body. . . . ​Her Afro also became an emblem of gender, feminine, and even sexual transgressions.”31 Ele­ments of Rivero’s discussion of Lucecita’s visuality could be broadened with an inclusion of how the 1960s Lucecita was not merely whitened. Black entrepreneurship models are clearly in evidence on her first covers, as is the ascendancy of the fashion industry, which, while casting the young artist in normative modes, was quite mindful of the market niche emerging from the The Thinking Voice  191

counterculture. What is undertheorized in Rivero’s discussion of Lucecita between 1970 and 1973, and hence in a discussion of race and more specifically blackness, are the sonic and m ­ usic culture contexts. Granted, Rivero’s book is about tele­vi­sion, not pop ­music. Yet in Lucecita’s case, the social discussion is, at best, incomplete without a full consideration of her m ­ usic. The artist’s star body, its reception, is unthinkable without taking into account voice’s material presence (in the double sense of commodity and event). Pedro Rivera Toledo arranged “Soy de una raza pura” in Puerto Rico before the artist traveled to Spain with Tomás Figueroa to cut the rec­ord. Lucecita works mostly with her head voice, with clear diction and, generally speaking, not much chest voice or low register, which must undeniably have made it less unruly to the m ­ iddle classes who largely bought rec­ords. The song pres­ents what could be thought of as a liberal construction of oppositionality all the way to the song’s second half, when, introduced by increased instrumentation and reverb, we hear: Soy de una raza pura, pura rebelde Soy tambor y cuerda Soy bronce de campana Para llorar a muerte Pero como soy de bronce también sé gritar A guerra I come from a pure race, a rebel race I am drums and strings I am the bell’s bronze, willing to weep to death But since I am made of bronze I also know how to shout War This led to the song’s most celebrated verse, in which Lucecita, recorded on two tracks spliced together, harmonizes with her own per­for­mance: Soy borincano, negro y gitano I am Puerto Rican, black, and gypsy A declaration immediately followed by the ending, a rousing coda: Soy taíno, y soy lágrimas, y también dolor Por los siglos que he vivido 192  Chapter 4

Por lo mucho que he sufrido Soy de una raza pura, pura rebelde Soy de una raza pura ¡Rebelde! I am a Taíno Indian, and tears, and also pain ­Here’s to the centuries I have lived ­Here’s to all that I have suffered I descend from a pure, pure, rebel race I descend from a pure race A rebel race! “Soy de una raza pura” referenced blackness by enlisting ele­ments of soul. Lucecita worked melodically, with her typically crystalline delivery but without any melodramatic technique. Prior tracks recorded by the artist had serially presented blackness as an alterity loosely aligned with Lucecita’s star body. The auteur phase’s melodramatic pathos characterized songs like Venegas Llo­ veras’s “Raza negra” (Black race) (“¡Raza que transmite su pena / a través del bongó! [Race that transmits its sorrow / through the bongos!]). In her artiste phase, the ste­reo­typical rhythm section of “Gitanito” (­Little gypsy) evoked a tropicalist sound vaguely reminiscent of the blackness that the cover, a profile of the artist with her Afro, colorized in shades of blue and black, virtually guaranteed. “Soy de una raza pura” is superior to e­ ither track ­because of its economy of technique and willful engagement of left-­leaning politics. It strives to go beyond the manufactured star body, engaging an artistic cohort she had just met and befriended. This group provided a collective sense to her intuitive vocal disordering of expected sense, her commercialized blackness included. Fred Moten’s question, “What is it to be an irreducibly disordering, deformational force while at the same time being absolutely indispensable to normative order, normative form?,” is very relevant to Lucecita as a “case of blackness.”32 “Soy de una raza pura” does advocate for the insertion of racial difference into the unity of the national subject. In this re­spect, it’s not set apart that much from the “three roots theory” Puerto Rican ­children ­were learning in school at the time from standard textbooks, such as María Luisa Babín’s Fantasía boricua (Puerto Rican fantasy). Nevertheless, it struck a new po­liti­cal chord. Audience members waited, some in thrall, o ­ thers in disgust, u ­ ntil the moment when the artist, performing live on tele­vi­sion, raised her left fist on the line “también sé gritar / ¡a guerra!” (I also know how to shout / war!). The Thinking Voice  193

She inscribed, via a momentary dissonance in the star body, the proindependence and diffusely leftist gesture forever into the song and collective memory. One of the finest examples of the rock ballad that Lucecita executed so well is on the same lp (Hit Parade 70), Alberto Carrión’s “Camino abandonado” (Forgotten path). The song’s reference to “compañero” (which in the original must have been “compañera”) is very much in tune with the sexual politics of the period and especially with New Left recastings of the male-­female relationship as one of equals. This revised “lovers’ discourse” resonates with the Cuban Revolution’s adoption of the word “compañero” (comrade) as the socially acceptable form of address, indicating social equality and equal participation in the revolutionary pro­cess. Lucecita’s recording employed the same arrangement as Carrión’s original. The proper place of romantic m ­ usic in liberation became a hotly debated topic among left artistic circles. In Puerto Rico as elsewhere, love was treated as a laboratory for the revolution, an opportunity to create in microcosm an exemplary space ­free of the colonial mentality, where equality would function as a seed to move humanity t­oward a just world. More profoundly, it’s clear that romantic ­music became an uneasy stand-in for aesthetic pursuits and ­whether they could ever be straightforwardly po­liti­cal: a synecdoche for art, period. The key to the beauty of Lucecita’s interpretation of “Camino abandonado” is, as­suredly, the opportunity to hear her singing the entire ballad in the low register, a particularly wondrous experience in live per­for­mance. ­After taking voice lessons in the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to preserve her instrument, by and large a successful effort, she stated, “I am a contralto with a ­little more tessitura than normal,” a designation she likely got from her voice coach, Rina de Toledo.33 Not only was her voice dif­fer­ent from t­hose of her contemporaries, it was also striking in terms of what deep voices in ­women ­were taken to represent and the strictures about how ­women ­were supposed to sound.34 Lucecita remarked, “My ­middle register is the most beautiful” and “folks are amazed that one can reach very high notes,” but it’s likely that the public associated ­those high notes with feminine singing, and felt awe much more when she exhibited her capacity to go to the lowest notes.35 Lucecita managed to suspend the relevance of this expectation, not merely defy it. In her auteur phase, Lucecita had shown her dexterity in usurping the male space of the songwriter and her skill at creating the track, that all-­impor­ tant hallmark of modern musical creativity, often a male preserve. H ­ ere, her

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mighty chest voice belting out the power ballad is an added ele­ment of this takeover. Just as impor­tant is the claiming of the emptiness or dissolution that the song thematizes: Cuánto tiempo llevo sola Necesito un compañero a mi lado Necesito aquel amor de mi pasado He vagado sin saber a dónde ir He intentado recorrer mil senderos que exploré Y a veces pienso De qué me sirve rebuscar Si sé que nada he de encontrar Oh, I have been alone so long I need a partner by my side I need to recover that love from my past I have wandered aimlessly I have tried to go back on a thousand paths I have walked on And sometimes I tell myself What’s the point of all this searching If I know I ­will find nothing Dissolution as a male fear is prevalent in male singer-­songwriter (cantautor) repertoire (an example might be the ­later Facundo Cabral and his 1970 hit, “No soy de aquí” [I’m not from ­here], or Joan Manuel Serrat’s 1971 “Vagabundear” [Wandering]). Dissolution is also prominent in the British and American rock ballads Alberto Carrión learned from rec­ords and the budding fm radio, and prob­ably favored.36 Lucecita’s vocal power and virtuosity raised this and other ballads above the banality permanently hovering at their edges. Male melancholy ceded space to another code in the making, one with no discursive encasing, like what tran­spired with her per­for­mance of “Génesis.” Th ­ ere, she sang, “When nothing is left on Earth to feel the warmth of the sun”; h ­ ere, she bemoans, “What’s the point of all this searching / If I know I ­will find nothing.” ­These lyr­ics reflect male melancholy, but Lucecita was not a melancholy star, masculine or feminine. Her vocal per­for­mance established the fact. What was she, then? Lucecita’s alignment with dissolution or nothing is qualitatively dif­fer­ent from that of her male contemporaries, as I explore for the rest of this chapter. Her recoding of melancholy and melodrama suggests The Thinking Voice  195

an imbuing of thought into pop song, the existence of a yearning for or orientation to thought. An extremely in­ter­est­ing, even disturbing, 1973 interview, “Con Lucecita” (With Lucecita), in the groundbreaking journal Zona carga y descarga (Loading zone), illustrates the artist’s loneliness even in the friendliest of quarters. The first impulse would be to expect Rosario Ferré and Manuel Ramos Otero, two of Puerto Rico’s most impor­tant writers of the latter half of the twentieth ­century, to grasp Lucecita’s singularity fully. Ferré is a pathbreaking feminist writer, and Ramos Otero broke open the literary establishment with his daring, queer short stories of the 1970s. The piece proceeds along two separate discursive routes: on the one hand, that of the po­liti­cally committed artist extraordinaire, virtually a hero, and, on the other, that of the genius artist who cannot find her interlocution or perhaps exists in another place altogether, unsymbolizable, possibly the subject position that Giorgio Agamben has referred to as “con­temporary.”37 Ramos Otero opens the interview praising Lucecita for her just-­released po­liti­cal ­album (the self-­titled Lucecita, with the Martorell cover and the track “Soy de una raza pura”; figure 4.11). manuel: Lucy, yo quisiera concentrar en tu último disco. Definitivamente este disco es diferente a los otros hechos anteriormente. Y demuestra toda esa unidad en la cuestión del tema de la liberación que está presente a través de todo el disco. . . . ​ lucy: Pero tú estas entrando políticamente a la música que yo he hecho. manuel: No, definitivamente yo creo que la ­labor que tú acabas de realizar en este disco es política. lucy: ¿Tú crees que no es artística? manuel: Ah, claro está definitivamente, porque nada que salga de ti no podría ser artístico. lucy: Indiscutiblemente. manuel: Lucy, I’d like to concentrate on your last rec­ord. Definitely, this rec­ord is dif­fer­ent from the preceding. It demonstrates unity in the question of the theme of liberation, pres­ent throughout the rec­ord. . . . ​ lucy: But your entry point to my ­music is po­liti­cal. manuel: No, I definitely think that the work you have produced in this a­ lbum is po­liti­cal. 196  Chapter 4

lucy: You ­don’t think of it as artistic? manuel: Of course, definitely, ­because nothing that came out of you cannot but be artistic. lucy: Undeniably.38 Ramos Otero framed the discussion in a Marcusian politics as liberation at all levels, which addressed personal liberation, self-­reflection, self-­possession, love equality, and so forth. To be fair, the complete ­album does respond to ­these coordinates, being a motley collection of the era’s love-­and-­peace zeitgeist with the exception of the two tracks I have discussed. Lucecita understood ­those discussions and how they applied to her art, of course. She found it problematic, though, that the first and maybe only appraisal of her work would not be purely artistic. By artistic, she meant perfect. Are the tracks laid out correctly? Is every­one landing the pitches and hitting the notes? Is my diction crystal-­clear? In fact, when Ramos Otero asks Lucecita if she has any regrets about the criticism she received upon the a­ lbum’s release, she replies that her only regret was that it “­didn’t come out perfect,” by which she signaled a musician’s desire to strive for the aesthetic, for beauty.39 ­There was an injunction that the artist represent the social sign, that she be po­liti­cal, when she clearly wanted to be artistic, representing nothing (distinct from her other existence as a private individual, understood as, among other ­things, a colonial subject). It’s not that the po­liti­cal in art did not interest her, but that her execution lacked a corresponding capacity for its symbolization in society, making it hard to sync two diverging senses of what “po­liti­cal” meant: hers and every­one ­else’s. “Artistic” was also an unclear signifier. I think Lucecita was aware of this, possibly more so than her interviewers, who subscribed to typical left notions of liberation and the role of artists as the vanguard of this liberation. The very notion of beauty was compromised, muddling what “artistic” could mean in this context. In terms of musical taste, the corporatist sound (of which Lucecita’s close associate Pedro Rivera Toledo was a main architect as arranger of several pop musicians of the time) had essentially hijacked tele­vi­sion and concert life. The memorable, albeit conservative, Festival Casals continued its ­labor in the symphonic world. Salsa and Afro–­Puerto Rican ­music dueled with American rock and alternative m ­ usic, pitting two imaginaries in a type of class and race cultural warfare. Puerto Rican pop, in the meantime, was increasingly condemned to middlebrow audiences and its liveness was fast ­dying out on tele­vi­sion. The complete interview includes Lucecita’s scathing critique of the The Thinking Voice  197

entertainment industry. Still, she searched for art’s and her own relevance to the times. Pop had become, to put it succinctly, a Baudrillardian simulacrum of a collective existence that did not address the breakdown of society ­under late colonialism. As mentioned, Paquito Cordero had Lucecita enter and exit styles and tv shows in rapid succession, never allowing for any one concept to mature and specifically instructing the artist not to express any po­liti­cal sympathies (meaning, to mouth any po­liti­cal opinions). Cordero did not care about a po­liti­cal bent to songs: Her musically inflected oppositionality clearly aided sales (as did her Afro turn and her dissonant, tuxedo-­clad femininity). What power­ful concerns among the public ­really resented at this time was her assumption of po­liti­cal speech, such as the well-­known raised fist in support of in­de­pen­dence. Perhaps more subtly, resentment ­toward Lucecita’s intuitive, yet certainly advanced understanding of the technologies for transmitting the voice, relative to other pop artists in the colony, is discernible too. Any exercise of a thinking voice in the colony at the close of the 1960s and into the explosive 1970s was dangerous. Lucecita was a celebrity and made money and therefore could defy the expectations of the consumer culture that had made her famous. Her resolute queerness onstage and her capacity to outvocalize anyone in an asphyxiatingly heteronormative society had the potential to be world transforming. In this context, Lucecita and her team’s adaptation of black pride iconography must have come as something of a relief to multiple sectors b ­ ecause, however startling the Afro may have been, it was fascinating, readable, containable, deployable, and punishable, while her voice in per­for­mance and its queer embodiment demanded a more complicated exercise of thought. It was, as with “Génesis,” the artist’s per­for­mance and the sedimentation of meanings she had accrued that made “Soy de una raza pura” a classic and touchstone. It climbed the charts and represented an unusual moment when celebrity and the thinking voice coexisted. The artist, however, felt estranged from her recording and image. A closer look at the iconography of 1970–1973 reveals an unexamined tug-­of-­war between the tuxedo and the Afro —­ social, mainly sartorial signs that the artist most likely experienced as secondary to the sonorous event of the voice. Having become overdetermined by the social (read mostly visually), Lucecita risked losing her grasp of the thinking voice; she risked merely being consumed as a celebrity, albeit a nonconforming, controversial one. Although as a young artist she had stated she coveted

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fame, when fame arrived it left her a l­ittle cold, perhaps b ­ ecause it became notoriety. It was no longer about the thinking voice. The artist lost interest in celebrity and singing, lamenting in the Zona interview on the release of her “Soy de una raza pura,” “Yo puedo cantar, pero no hablar” (I can sing, but I cannot speak).40

FUGITIVITY In 1974, fi­nally freed from contractual obligations to her man­ag­ers and at last the owner of her musical ­labor, Lucecita was ready to create true artistic trou­ble with the landmark concert Traigo un pueblo en mi voz (I bring a ­people in my voice), in which she switched to a cantautor (male singer-­songwriter) repertoire. Unfortunately, no recording of the concert is commercially available. The title comes from the 1973 Mercedes Sosa ­album Traigo un pueblo en mi voz; the phrase “I bring a ­people in my voice” is the second verse of the refrain of “Hermano dame tu mano” (­Brother, give me your hand), a New Left song by Jorge Sosa and Damián Gómez. Betzaida “Bebé” López, then married to Danny Rivera, had traveled to Latin Amer­i­ca and brought back rec­ords that supplied much of Lucecita’s po­liti­cal repertoire. Lucecita also turned to Puerto Rican songwriters associated with the left, such as Alberto Carrión and Antonio Cabán Vale, “El Topo.” Politics and affect ­were coming together in a particularly intense way in Puerto Rico. One of the main economic reasons was the oil crisis of 1973, which affected Puerto Rico severely. Another was homegrown: the failure of the Estado Libre Asociado (Commonwealth of Puerto Rico), which was fast showing its huge cracks, as memorialized in the brilliant Luis Rafael Sánchez novel Macho Camacho’s Beat and analyzed in a landmark essay by José Luis González, “The Four-­Storeyed Country.” Writers ­were coalescing around noted journals like Zona carga y descarga, and the group known as “the new historians” was producing a revisionist historiography that yielded many impor­tant monographs and changed the writing of Puerto Rican history. And, with the founding of the Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican Socialist Party) came one of the de­cade’s most impor­tant publications, the newspaper Claridad (Clarity), which featured a cultural supplement starting in 1974 called En Rojo (In red), announcing, perhaps, its hard-­line cultural tendencies. Reportage on po­liti­cally conscious ­music and musicians regularly appeared in En Rojo. As was to be expected, Lucecita became a regular topic

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of the supplement. She was as much of a cipher for her left-­wing admirers as she was for her mainstream public. Lucecita sympathized with liberation movements generally and had long been proindependence. Yet she took pains to clarify that she did not “belong to any po­liti­cal party,” “was not against any po­liti­cal leader,” and “belonged to the ­people.”41 Mita Torres, who had studied po­liti­cal science at the University of Puerto Rico and had deci­ded to become a po­liti­cal or­ga­nizer, contacted the artist around 1973. Torres was a member of several small, radical groups, and she joined the Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño upon its founding in 1971. Torres was interested in the cultural promotion of left-­wing ­causes and knew several artists personally: the choreographer Lotti Cordero, the actor Miguel Ángel Suárez, the dance teacher Nana Hudo, and the photographer Gabriel Suau (who was married to the actress Camille Carrión). Through them, she met Lucecita and took up the task of persuading her to sing at a benefit concert for left-­wing ­causes.42 At that moment the sonic Lucecita, who had poured herself into her recordings, for the most part, and supplemented her output with tele­vi­sion appearances as per her contract, turned almost wholly to connecting with large, cross-­class live audiences. The gorgeous program booklet provides a visual trace of this brief but significant attempt to change the terms of Lucecita’s celebrity existence, encapsulated in the limpid image of the artist singing, simply emanating sound from an open mouth (figure  4.12). The staff at Revista Avance, a short-­lived but prescient journalistic venture,43 keyed into the significance of this image and Lucecita’s canny understanding of m ­ usic production as integrating vari­ous ele­ments of the sensorium: In all aspects of the concert’s publicity: posters, newspaper ads, entry tickets and ticket envelopes, invitations to the press, invitations sent out to guests of honor, the program —­ beautifully printed with lyr­ics to some of the songs and sold at a dollar due to printing costs —­ even in the curtain that falls ­behind the singer at the end of both parts of the concert, in sum, every­thing employed a distinctive graphic design created by the artists Felipe Cuchí and Ivonne Torres. This graphic design consisted of a profile of a singing Lucecita, with three variously colored strips emerging from her open mouth, symbolizing musical notes. This proved to be very effective and gave the concert a special touch, being that it is the first time anything of the sort has been done in Puerto Rico.44 200  Chapter 4

figure 4.12 ​Attempting to exit celebrity. Program cover booklet for Traigo un pueblo en mi voz, May 1974. The cover is printed in black, white, and grays.

The booklet pres­ents lyr­ics of the concert along with the concert program. It also includes several photo­graphs of the artist away from her celebrity mode, not exactly a star body produced by the machine, but not just any old body, ­either. She has magnetism and mystique, but put to vastly dif­fer­ent ends. She appears carefree and relaxed and is photographed at play and smiling. The first page has a dedication: “Dedicado a mi pueblo y a mi gente” (Dedicated to my ­people and my folks). The booklet’s printed lines are typeset in a clean brown, set against a white background, with no overt nationalist content. ­There are no Puerto Rican flags or folkloric embellishments anywhere in the program. The politics appear subliminally in the era’s typical codes of ­music as rainbow, ­music as truth, “my ­people” as the recipient but not yet categorically defined, and the artist in street clothes. This piece is surely one of the most loaded with meaning of all Lucecita ephemera, precisely b ­ ecause it is s­ imple and understated, yet enormously evocative. Lucecita was the concert’s producer. The photos transmit her ideal of the total artist, involved in e­ very aspect of the production, at the center yet in a group of like-­minded individuals, a heterotopia in Michel Foucault’s sense.45 The The Thinking Voice  201

collective enterprise presaged ele­ments of Nancy’s concept of “being-­singular-­ plural,” in which singularity and collectivity are not warring existences but comment on each other and remain permanently open ended, open to change.46 An impor­tant detail is the inclusion of a street portrait of Pedro Rivera Toledo, much dif­fer­ent from the usual stage persona of highbrow concert director that he is associated with. While posed, it does not respond to leftist ideals of populist authenticity; he is seen bearded and smoking a cigar, in an image reminiscent of con­temporary rock aesthetics. The duo Lucecita-­Pedro is rendered as one where Lucecita is the source of the art and Pedro an essential artistic soulmate but not the art’s creator or administrator, as he would l­ater be seen. The staff at Avance wrote, “The basic difference of the Sylvia Rexach [Theater] concert to t­hose of the Hilton is that t­here ­will be no songs of the type labeled ‘commercial,’ only musical compositions with a social content. Along the same line of her latest rec­ord, the one with the Martorell cover (‘I belong to a pure race . . .’).”47 Yet this contestatory, scintillating concert appearance soon gave way to a conservative mode featuring a stylized per­for­mance of progressive politics, joining m ­ iddle-­class, corporate taste in m ­ usic with a vaguely left-­leaning repertoire. This unlikely marriage structured the 1975 live a­ lbum En las manos del pueblo (In the hands of the p ­ eople; figure 4.13).48 Despite its left-­leaning name, the ­album does not feature a po­liti­cal repertoire. Rather, it leans heavi­ly to sentimental song and draws especially on a pop singer-­songwriter (cantautor) from Argentina, Alberto Cortez (ten of the nineteen tracks are his). ­Lucecita returned to costumes, wearing Martin’s interpretation of the dashiki, in a vaguely Africanist look with close-­cropped hair. Some commentators claimed that Martin had designed this new wear to help Lucecita conceal the fact she had gained weight. More than this sexist appraisal, it’s likely that the costume represented the zero of repre­sen­ta­tion, in total opposite to Lucecita’s rich iconography up to then. Pedro Rivera Toledo now appeared in the hallowed position of conductor, was called “maestro,” and wore a tuxedo. The sound was unabashedly symphonic. ­There is a nod to Puerto Rican awareness in Lucecita’s per­for­mance of “La verdad” (Truth), from the venerable Rafael Cortijo, Rafael Cortijo and His Time Machine /Y su máquina del tiempo (1974). It was, significantly, retitled “Le Lo Lai” a­ fter Puerto Rico’s celebrated phrase of belonging from the jíbaro corpus, which is the song’s refrain: El que me quiera escuchar, que me escuche Y el que se quiera tapar, que se tape 202  Chapter 4

figure 4.13 ​­Album cover, Lucecita, En las manos del pueblo, 1975.

Voy a decir la verdad, caballero Aunque me parta un rayo Si usted quiere ser cantante, tiene que aprender primero A cantar esos cantares que vienen del extranjero Porque nuestra tradición, caballero, Rueda por el suelo Le lo lai, le lo lai, rueda por el suelo He who wants to listen to me, let him listen He who wants to hide, let him hide I’m ­going to tell the truth, sir Even if I’m struck by lightning If you want to be a singer You first have to learn to sing foreign tunes ­Because our tradition, sir Is ­going down the drain Le lo lai, le lo lai, it’s ­going down the drain The Thinking Voice  203

figure 4.14 ​“Lucecita, or frankness in the guise of an artist.” Cover of the tv guide, Telerevista, of the newspaper El Mundo, April 28–­May 4, 1974.

Lucecita sang “Le Lo Lai” in Traigo un pueblo en mi voz. The arrangement was copied from Cortijo’s recording, including the psychedelic rock guitar line and funky brass blares. It was the perfect cover song for Lucecita, who was on a quest to pursue parrhesia, “speaking truth to power.”49 She had declared just before, in the 1973 Zona interview, “When I felt oppressed, when I felt they wanted to reduce me, it ­wasn’t ­because of my talent, it was over nothing; they tried to stop me ­because I was telling the truth. . . . ​I have truth in my hands and if they kill me with it, I ­will die happy as hell, I prefer to die like that, ­because I told the truth, not ­because I kept ­silent about it.”50 Figure 4.14 is a print drawing of this period that encapsulates Lucecita’s noncelebrity persona with the caption: “Lucecita, or frankness in the guise of an artist.” Im­por­tant in this portrayal is her repre­sen­ta­tion in the act of speaking and thinking; it seems she is pausing in the ­middle of a statement, and she is clearly interpellating a listener via speech, not song. We also notice her out of stage costume,

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in street clothes, and the visual re-­creation of her black identity linked to this frankness. The ­music and entertainment complex represented this power most immediately; the threat of cultural assimilation figured in the refrain of “Le Lo Lai” represented it more generally, in the context of what was termed at the time “U.S. cultural penetration.” Cortijo is Puerto Rico’s most esteemed twentieth-­century Afro–­Puerto Rican artist and, arguably, the most impor­tant. The codes of funk and psychedelic link Cortijo and by extension Lucecita’s embroilment with truth to an alternative black modernity, away from the folklorization of blackness that was most familiar to the Puerto Rican audience that clapped and sang with abandon while Lucecita belted out this song live. Rivera Toledo added a cua­ tro solo at the end of the song (Millito Cruz played the cuatro, which was not featured as an instrument elsewhere in the song per­for­mance or the rest of the program), provoking a loud roar of recognition from the audience. While this may be read as a nativist recovery of an other­wise fugitive song, it does not take away from the song’s main identity as Afro-­diasporic, even if it was not necessarily touted as such. Lucecita felt just at home with symphonic arrangements. Naturally, ­these ­were received as the polar opposite of black m ­ usic. She could not be read within one matrix, becoming an example of what Daphne Brooks, building on Mae Henderson, refers to as “Afro-­sonic feminist noise,” “a kind of sound composed of heteroglossic gestures that articulate ‘the ability to speak in diverse (musical) languages.’ ”51 Brooks goes on to quote Moten: “In ‘­music’ . . . ​ ‘blackness indicates chromaticity as a potentially un­regu­la­ted or profligate internal difference,’ ” and, further down, Brooks echoes Moten’s interest in “radical forms of aurality that upset normative definitions of meaningful speech and conventional musical [structures].”52 Brooks discusses Nina Simone as paradigmatic of black female vocality in this context of “defamiliarizing sociocultural expectations of where and how black ­women should sound in song.”53 Simone, as is well known, intended to become a classical pianist and, derailed by racism from her life’s pursuit, injected this classical affiliation into jazz and pop. Lucecita did not play instruments or desire to become a classical musician ever, but she was undeniably attracted to symphonic sound and used her voice in a virtuosic manner. Similarly to Simone and ­others like her, Lucecita had her own logic and simply refused to be confined to any one expectation, w ­ hether sentimental or social. This extended to her views on her voice as the vehicle for speech.

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She was well aware of her potential to enter the world stage as a spokesperson for Puerto Rico, as multiple commentators had pointed out since her triumph with “Génesis.”54 Studies such as Alexander Weheliye’s on sonic Afromodernity might go far to elucidate the extent of Lucecita’s transgression as a black musician and allow for a nuanced approach to her concept as a singer and artist, respecting and marshaling the fact that she thought musically. Weheliye rejects the notion of black sound as “an idealized, authentically vernacular, or discrete sphere that distinguishes Afro-­diasporic cultural production in/as Western modernity.” He argues instead that black sound “creates and re-­calibrates” some of modernity’s “central topoi, such as the equation of script with reason and humanity, narratives of unmitigated pro­gress, and the configuration of vision as incorporeal and therefore the apex of scientific rationality.” Modernity’s “discourses are neither erased nor suspended; rather, they are significantly (re)created in their encounter with auditory blackness, which also undergoes substantial shifts in this assemblage.”55 Lucecita’s protestation that she needed to reach other audiences than ­those sympathetic to self-­determination might strike some listeners as naive, but it could be read more productively as a refusal to signify easily, to be readily legible as a black artist, which would mean conforming to folkloric protocols of blackness not excluding the easy consumption of oppositionality and sartorial signs such as her own Afro that she had beautifully donned. (Indicatively, the entertainment press discussed her “Afro look” as an assumption of a modern hairdo on more than one occassion.) Her “incoherent” discourse, much remarked upon but seldom seen in print except for the Zona interview, can and perhaps should be read as a refusal to give up the sonic centrality of every­thing she worked for as an artist. Take, for example, this moment in the 1973 Zona interview: The ­people who fill the Hilton, ­etc., they are dif­fer­ent from the lefties —­ ­those are the ones that need to listen to us. I ­don’t need to convince you, but the fool that sits ­there, the guy who has money. I have to convince him. Period. That’s ­great, a concert at the University of Puerto Rico, fill the theater, divine, a lot of fist raising and every­body chanting “Long live a ­free Puerto Rico!” but where I want to instigate the movement is precisely where nothing similar has ever appeared. I’m not with the cap­i­tal­ist, damn it! I believe they utilize and you have to utilize them. They own the medium and well then, you have to go through the medium. I am not proindependence, I am not a nationalist, 206  Chapter 4

I am nothing; I believe that Puerto Rico has to be a ­free country, period. That’s the way it is, good or bad —­ we have to be ­free. The only ­thing you ­can’t allow is to have freedom taken from you, ­because then you become nothing, nothing, ­you’re nothing, ­you’re nobody, ­you’re a good for nothing.56 If we take Lucecita’s quest to represent truth at face value, without stopping to verify if she served the protocols of articulateness or codes of conduct of the intellectually inclined singer, we may verify Weheliye’s “encounter with auditory blackness” as a “recoloration of topoi.”57 Lucecita’s analy­sis is revealing, its disjointed nature illuminating. In the interview, she severely criticizes right-­wing-­affiliated singers, pointing out that they are “­doing politics too, and d ­ on’t suffer any retaliation.”58 But perhaps the most telling critique is of the leftist movement in Puerto Rico, and her subtle (although not subtly expressed) appraisal of symbolic culture (of which protest song and the revolutionary ballad partook) as potentially empty gestures that did not significantly alter the status quo of colonialism in Puerto Rico. She raised her left fist in the proindependence gesture during her concerts; however, she felt that performing the gesture in a musical environment among a group of in­de­pen­dentistas could lapse into a narcissistic self-­congratulation or minoritarian plenitude. She wanted no part of that. Hence her frequent declaration that she was not affiliated with any po­liti­cal party but with her conscience or truth. Troubled with what her own vocalizing had become, Lucecita arrived at the very quandary of vocality, of the ­human voice: “The voice is sound, not speech. But speech constitutes its essential destination.”59 Vocal per­for­mance, as it existed in the colony in the mid-1970s, was possibly curtailing her attempts at speech. She started to mention writing a book about her life. She enrolled in classes at the University of Puerto Rico, where she could be spotted performatively traversing the Río Piedras campus, surrounded by a dancing coterie of hip ­women. She appeared in po­liti­cal protests, sang in ­union events and for an array of left-­wing groups, and expressed sympathy for the Cuban Revolution, activities that would continue for the rest of the de­cade. As part of her exploration of what voice meant, Lucecita embarked on a trip to Cuba in the summer of 1975, just a­ fter the concert En las manos del pueblo. ­There she participated in vari­ous consciousness-­raising activities and sang at the opening of a school in Matanzas. When she came back she found that her native country had declared her persona non grata, contrary to 1969 and her triumphant return from the Festival de la Canción Latina. Lucecita The Thinking Voice  207

was blacklisted. She could not rec­ord or appear in entertainment venues or on tele­vi­sion, and her songs w ­ ere not played on the radio. Notwithstanding her previous celebrity status, vocal brilliance, and unending supply of “It,” she could not find work and became demonized as a leftist extremist. While in 1969 the Cold War had intersected with her per­for­mance of “Génesis” and other songs in her repertoire in a putatively positive way, the way her 1975 per­for­mances transected world crisis and the Cuban Revolution proved near catastrophic for her c­ areer; her celebrity was all but wiped out. The state had succeeded in making her notorious. For years ­after Lucecita’s po­liti­cal turn, when she attempted to refuse iconography and flout celebrity, she was harassed by the police, who took advantage of e­ very opportunity to e­ ither fabricate charges against her or make her into a criminal in the eyes of public opinion, especially as it related to drugs, one of the moral panics created by the new law-­and-­order state of the 1970s in collaboration with power­ful right-­wing ele­ments. Artist carpetas or fbi dossiers tracked their ­every move and constructed a narrative of delinquency directly threatening to the state. Archival newsprint items attest to the persecution and demonization of the singer. The front page of the newspaper El Mundo on August 25, 1976, shows Lucecita’s arrest embedded in local and world events, occupying the center of the page (figure 4.15). Numerous papers ran such images of the singer arrested on drug charges, and she became fodder for all kinds of rumors about her criminal nature. Earlier the same month, on August 1, El Mundo had headlined an article dissecting the “po­liti­ cal inclinations of artists in Puerto Rico.” Lucecita’s portrayal is vastly dif­fer­ ent from that of her colleagues in ­music and tele­vi­sion, with an open mouth (second at the left, ­under “Pro-­In­de­pen­dence”) and the caption: “Participates in many In­de­pen­dence Party and Socialist Party festivals.” Contextualizing this “mouth” along the lines of Weheliye’s sonic Afromodernity necessitates relating it to the mouth Paquito Cordero sought to police. Most commentators believe that, upon assumption of her Afro, she was liberated from racial shackles and then repressed ­because of her leftist politics. Yet she clearly did not have this clear-­cut trajectory and, moreover, this purely progressive and affirmative trajectory might be an example of a collective wish fulfillment but is not a description of this artist and does l­ ittle to help us interpret her c­ areer and iconic importance. Rather, her vari­ous levels of meaning, from social to musical and back, can be read as the disordering and fugitive impulse Brooks, Moten, and Weheliye read as blackness. The artist herself spoke of why she was dangerous in the dominant culture’s eyes and at208  Chapter 4

figure 4.15 ​The front page of El Mundo shows Lucecita being arrested for possession of drugs, August 25, 1976, in dead center.

tributed this to her orientation ­toward the true —­ an orientation that, on more than one occassion, she claimed she did not yet have words or an explanation for (bringing to mind Heideggerian aletheia). Over the course of her c­ areer, her speech conflicted directly with what was legible socially, much as her body was also a zone of contestation between interpretations. Lucecita’s statements to Ramos Otero and Ferré could be misinterpreted as an antipathy to the nothing. Yet, in fact, they put into play a very subtle reading of the nothing, showing that t­ here is not a single nothing but several —­ that the nothing she describes in her Zona interview as “no sirve” (it’s good for nothing) and rejects is not equal to the rhizomatic nothing that she claims for herself: “I am nothing.”60 The Zona interview I have referenced is one of t­ hose moments in the archive that allows a glimpse into her uncivil, fugitive speech, with ­little censorship, self or other­wise. Articles in Claridad verify the conflicting way in which her speech was received from the friendly left perspective, which, however, could impose its own set of demands on the artist. For example, in a review of the concert ¡Creceremos! of 1980, Rafael Rodríguez, the paper’s ­music critic, wrote: Elsewhere, I have mentioned the difference between Luz Esther —­ the person —­ and Lucecita —­ the singer. Onstage, they become confused with the performer [intérprete] but one of them —­ Luz Esther —­ speaks and the other —­ Lucecita —­ sings. Luz Esther speaks less, way less. And when she does manage to speak she should always stick to the script she has practiced. The audience ­doesn’t want to hear about “this fucking life. . . . ​We are screwed. . . . ​We all shit the same” [la fucking vida . . . ​, que estamos jodidos . . . ​, que todos cagamos igual]. All artists belong to their audiences [se debe a su público] and ­there is no need for that verbal aggression, not to mention the performative aggression [agresión escénica].61 Rodríguez mentions Caribe Hilton concerts in June 1977 and July 1978 as examples of good taste, curiously aligning the left proj­ect with bourgeois notions of what a pop artist should offer onstage to paying concertgoers. This critic seems quite upset at Lucecita’s use of so-­called foul language. Anyone who has seen her live can attest to this banter, alarming to some and delightful to o ­ thers. A dif­fer­ent use of obscenity happened out of the earshot of the audience, smack in the ­middle of a song’s per­for­mance. She turned her back on her audience in the ­middle of a searing interpretation of a power ballad (perhaps Carrión’s “Camino abandonado” or Alberto Cortez’s “Qué tal te va 210  Chapter 4

sin mí” [How are you ­doing without me?]) and mouthed completely unrelated obscenities, addressing her musicians. The dialogue with fellow musicians in per­for­mance was more impor­tant —­ in fact, it was the anchor —­ of putting up a ­great show for the fans to enjoy. She never cared much for direct contact with fans, disliking the l­ abor that musicians u ­ nder contract had to perform in order to cultivate the fan base back then (such as greeting fans ­after a concert). ­These obligations ­were out of sync with her understanding of voice. Indeed, since her days as a youth star, she entertained an ambivalent relationship with fans and their relationship of identification with her —­ their demand that she be their “all.”62 This correlates with the type of reaction she sought to elicit, geared ­toward truth rather than emotionality or adoration, which in turn correlates with her relationship to technology and aligns her with Weheliye’s constellation of the Afro-­diasporic. Since her c­ areer began, she had shown a propensity to create the track, that hallmark of musical modernity, possibly in a superior way compared to her contemporaries in pop ­music. From vari­ous interviews, I gathered that the artist’s approach to laying down tracks was all business, in the best sense of the word. She understood what was at stake for each and ­every instrument when encountering the technological medium, and famously demanded perfection (as seen in the Zona interview when she said that her only regret was that it “­didn’t come out perfect”). During the 1970s, and not coincidentally ­after she ended her contract with Cordero, she explored amplification, particularly the microphone, essential to live per­for­mances. Around this time, multiple images, such as the ­album cover for En las manos del pueblo, display a good-­sized microphone very close to her mouth. Steven Connor writes of the “touched sound” of the microphone. Against the easy interpretation of the microphone as phallic, he suggests, instead, “The grippings, bendings, brandishings, and more violent repertoire of ‘tactations’ effected upon the microphone seem to enact the determination that the production of sound should be not so much highly and spectacularly vis­i­ble as visibly tangible, a plastic work of hands and mouth combined, an exteriorization of the minor agon of sound production in the mouth.”63 Connor makes it pos­si­ble to understand Lucecita’s filiation with the microphone as a way to focus on her ­music and not on her image.64 Mita Torres recounted how the artist routinely blew out microphones while she was testing them on trips to New York.65 She needed a mike that could carry her volume, that would not fail technically during the moment of delivery and leave her in the nothing she deplored, in the state of “no sirve,” of being “good for nothing.” Musically, Lucecita transmitted her vocality in a The Thinking Voice  211

very substantive way and targeted that “telephone receiver” that was the listener’s ear which, as Freud commented, was connected to the “telephone” of the unconscious.66 She did not want to evoke emotions or contribute to affects traditionally associated with ­music fandom, which stem from identification and plenitude. She wanted p ­ eople to think, to pursue truth. Truth for her was not the social-­realist message of protest songs, or the ­simple lyr­ics of equality between men and ­women in love ballads, much discussed in the pages of En Rojo.67 Truth was transport, a moment of suspension when the listener was completely keyed into her voice, subordinating the social content, the symphonic arrangement, the conductor’s authority, every­thing to that moment of transmission and reception, creating a fugitive subjectivity.68 Her quest resonates with 1970s advances in media theory. Lucecita wanted to contribute to “an emergent structure of listening” “as a gateway to a new collectivity,”69 one she did not recognize in the formations she witnessed around her and that competed to enlist her voice. Nevertheless, she had to mine the Latin American po­liti­cal and sentimental repertoires for her live concerts. Seeking to assume a noncelebrity persona, Lucecita borrowed from the Latin American cantautor, the singer-­songwriter embodied in vari­ous figures of the times, from Atahualpa Yupanqui and Facundo Cabral to Alberto Cortez and, although not Latin American, the Catalan with an impor­tant Latin American exile period, Joan Manuel Serrat. This is a notable and not sufficiently studied aspect of her innovation: how she crossed gender lines to claim a space and repertoire that was invariably gendered male. One of the critical ele­ments in the per­for­mances of ­these singer-­ songwriters was, in fact, their use of declamatory song and their frequent mingling of spoken and sung stanzas, making it pos­si­ble to address her statement, “I can sing, but I cannot speak.” As of this writing, readers with YouTube access can find a clip of Lucecita singing in the watershed Siete días con el pueblo (Seven days with the p ­ eople), a weeklong series of concerts held in the Dominican Republic in 1974, at the time u ­ nder the despotic rule of Joaquín Balaguer.70 As in Puerto Rico, Dominican dissident singers ­were routinely followed and harassed and many ­were simply prohibited from performing in certain venues, especially outside of the capital city of Santo Domingo. The near seven-­minute per­for­mance of Atahualpa Yupanqui’s “Coplas del payador” (Folk verses) shows Lucecita’s positioning in absolute artistic control and her quest for musical perfection; she is listening to her accompaniment, correcting the tempo, and tuning Pedro Rivera Toledo’s guitar. (Somehow, she was able to hear the pitch over 212  Chapter 4

and above the noise in the wide open space.) The live footage is a rare opportunity to listen to her combining spoken and sung stanzas and witness her relationship to the mike as an expression of fugitivity, a play with the relative nothing she had taken care to assume by then. The ending minute and a half, with the ­simple, three-­chord guitar accompaniment of the milonga, is: Una canción sale fácil Cuando se sabe cantar Cuestión de ver y pensar Sobre esas cosas del mundo Si el río es ancho y profundo Cruza quien sabe nadar Cantor que cante a los pobres Ni muerto se ha de callar Pues donde vaya a parar El canto de ese cristiano No ha de faltar el paisano Que lo haga resuscitar Yo no soy jíbaro malo Defiendo la honestidad Una sola es mi maldad Y se la voy a decir Con todito mi sentir Me gusta la libertad [Recited] A song comes easy If you know how to sing It merely requires seeing and thinking About life’s ­things If the river runs deep and wide Only ­those who know how to swim can hope to cross [chuckle] [Sung] Singer, you who sing to the poor Not even death can silence you Wherever the song Of the faithful goes ­There ­will be a fellow countryman Who ­will bring it back to life The Thinking Voice  213

I am not a bad jíbaro I simply defend honesty I have but one flaw Which I’m ­going to tell you about With all my feeling I like freedom Lucecita adapted Yupanqui’s criollismo by inserting the Puerto Rican phrase “jíbaro malo” right before the song aligns the first-­person speaker with honesty and freedom. The apparent transparency of this discourse, its pared-­down arrangement and bare-­bones instrumentation, might make us forget that she is singing in a huge stadium in front of thousands of ­people and depending on the agon of her mouth meeting the microphone. Additionally, we may miss the fact that even in leftist circles of protest and social ­music, Lucecita’s body is a far cry from the accepted feminine embodiment, and that her employ of the Latin Americanist repertoire points to an identification with meaning making more than it does with the relatively s­ imple male fantasies of detachment and unmooring evident in the song “Coplas del payador” and other classics of the era that she performed and some of which she recorded. Listening to her ­today, in the tracks she created then, without factoring in this gender crossing yields an incomplete appraisal of her feat as an artist. Part of it is not noticing the conceptual density of her relationship to technology, exemplified by the microphone, in par­tic­u­lar. Her participation in events such as Una semana para el pueblo or her per­ for­mances of “Traigo un pueblo en mi voz” and “La verdad” (“Le Lo Lai”) in the 1970s are much dif­fer­ent from the more familiar and, in historical terms, more recent delivery of “Oubao Moin” as her concert finale, taken from Juan Antonio Corretjer’s fifth canto from the longer Alabanza en la Torre de Ciales (A song of praise in the Ciales Tower), a 1950 nationalist poem of protest and rebellion. The Puerto Rican singer-­songwriter Roy Brown had recorded “Oubao Moin” as part of his 1977 rec­ord Distancias (Distances), in which he set to ­music ten Corretjer poems. Lucecita used “Oubao Moin” to end her concerts from the 1980s onward. This finale can be heard in the 1987 reprise of Traigo un pueblo en mi voz, which deployed the New Left repertoire when it was becoming archival. Mercedes Sosa herself had by then returned to Argentina and sought to rec­ord new songwriters, many working in rock en español and pop. The original finale, the song “Traigo un pueblo en mi voz,” became a recycled curiosity as the signifier “pueblo” was fast being recoded. In 1987 214  Chapter 4

Puerto Rico, the song was a symbol of the cultural nationalism historian Carlos Pabón meticulously and brilliantly deconstructed in Nación postmortem (Nation, postmortem), not necessarily of self-­determination. Musically, the per­for­mance was a throwback to the New Left reverence for the male space of the ­Great National Poet, and the pop my­thol­ogy of “authochthony” (in the song, the subjects of the so-­called three roots of Puerto Rico —­ white, black, and indigenous —­ are celebrated in turn as examples of the revolutionary subject: “¡Gloria a esas manos indias porque trabajaban! / ¡Gloria a esas manos negras porque trabajaban! / ¡Gloria a esas manos blancas porque trabajaban!” [Glory to ­those indigenous hands ­because they toiled! / Glory to ­those black hands b ­ ecause they toiled! / Glory to ­those white hands ­because they toiled!]). A generation of Puerto Ricans ­were acquiring Taíno names in the 1980s: Guananí, Urayoán, Bayrex, Bayoán, Ataveyra, Guarionex, Loaíza, Yoaíza, Yabanex, and several other chieftains and damsels in distress ­were recalled with awe by new parents who ­were professors, former activists of the 1970s, sympathizers of social justice ­causes, leftovers from the radical fringe of the 1970s, believers in Puerto Rican in­de­pen­dence, and the new segment of folks who ­were “Puerto Ricanist” but not necessarily and often not leftist. Many fans of the 1970s patiently suffered through the middling repertoires of the late 1980s just to be able to hear the singer perform “Oubao Moin” one more time, with the bombastic, martial instrumentation Pedro Rivera Toledo created for the song (complete with bugle clarion call at the end), leading to the moment when Lucecita raised her left fist and sang: “¡Alabanza! ¡Alabanza! ¡Para ellos y para su patria, alabanza!” (Praise! Praise! Praise be to them and their motherland!). The listener had to extract Lucecita’s voice from the inferior, shrill background vocalists that inexplicably worked with her through two de­cades, hampering her concerts and many recordings. And yet, through it all, the singer held the audience in thrall. W ­ hether it was due to the waning of oppositional politics, or to her sound and execution, to nostalgia, or a combination, the footage of t­ hose per­for­mances ­today demands a reading separated from the exercise of personal memory. It should take very seriously the clash between the song’s content and arrangement and the multilayered differences of the star body performing the song: By the 1980s, the singer had changed her persona completely. While the reasons ­were, in part, commercial, ­there may be o ­ thers at play too. Her perfect execution (pitch, diction, and so forth) fi­nally could coexist on stage with the obscene, street, and queer that had been repressed before. The po­liti­cal repertoire she became notorious for is inseparable from t­hese truly scandalous ele­ments, even if they ­were written out of The Thinking Voice  215

discourse and directly censored (the Luz Esther / Lucecita dichotomy quoted above from Claridad is exemplary, but by no means the only instance; other characterizations w ­ ere more extreme and directly insulting). By the same token, her romantic repertoire, long her specialty, should not be summarily dismissed as apo­liti­cal.

THE DIVA Despite continual harassment and difficulty landing any gigs, Lucecita remained steadfast in her commitment to in­de­pen­dence and to social justice. She thus became intrinsically related to meaning and truth beyond the realm of celebrity. Through the Socialist Party’s annual Festival de Claridad and other such open-­air events, principally Puerto Rico’s numerous fiestas patronales, or patron saint town festivals, she retained a live connection with an audience. Left circles, looking to the futurity of the “new man,” continued to have a hard time with sentimental song, deeming it an instance of false consciousness ­unless it straightforwardly represented equality between a man and a ­woman. Indeed, the topic recurred in the Socialist Party’s newspaper’s estimable cultural supplement, En Rojo, in which a wide array of articles dissected the nueva canción and nueva trova movements and the potential harm sentimental songs could portend for “the masses.”71 The left’s support of Lucecita was impor­tant but partial. It ultimately did not know what to make of her and continued to be patriarchal and normative, homophobic and sexist, thereby reducing thought. Eventually, ­because of her dire financial situation, she accepted somewhat perverse but well-­paid invitations to appear at exclusive private parties of wealthy liberals, where she was invariably requested to perform “Génesis,” a song she had outgrown.72 For ­these occasions, she was outfitted ­after this elite’s taste, in designer gowns evoking a normative femininity that was the polar opposite of the 1969 caped tux. Thus elites manipulated the artist through their twisted and privatized exercise of memory and their acquisition of power. They purchased a memory of the elusive moment when Puerto Rico broke into world fame but stripped this per­for­mance of thought and reformatted it to comply with heteronormativity. It is incorrect to blame the artist’s so-­called difficult personality or her alleged personal afflictions or her po­liti­cal turn for the derailment of her ­career, as many commentators, fans, and associates have done. Several social actors —­ right, left, and center —­ had a share, in part through damaged or ab216  Chapter 4

sent listening and a refusal to think voice. The right was the most problematic, since it aimed for outright suffocation of the voice. Imitating repressive regimes in South Amer­i­ca and Spain, the state promoted what Daniel Party terms the placer culpable (shameful plea­sure) of the 1970s balada, supporting artists who worked in this dominant, presumptively apo­liti­cal, and certifiable celebrity ­music.73 The singer ­really had l­ittle choice but to return to the more normative realm of celebrity as it was expressed in ­music culture in the aftermath of the 1970s. Lucecita’s third and final iconic moment happened with her turn to hyperfemininity in the 1980s. It began with ¡Creceremos! (1981), her first foray into recording ­after her six-­year forced hiatus. Although mixed in terms of its concept, it is in tune with Lucecita’s working-­class, socialist sympathies while remaining faithful to her core, the ballad. The ­album art is vastly dif­fer­ent from that of preceding years, reflecting a more limited bud­get for packaging and a virtually non­ex­is­tent bud­get or network for marketing, a recurring headache in the artist’s ­career. Nearly all of ­these rec­ords had a companion concert, which was often the only marketing resource available and also the singer’s chief way of making a living. Lucecita, much feminized, is portrayed holding a baby on the cover (Danny Rivera’s ­daughter Soldanela). ¡Creceremos! was her attempt to renovate her concept to appeal to dominant market taste while remaining faithful to her pursuit of artistic truth. In 1981, coming out of a period of blacklisting, during which the artist maintained a full work schedule of local, live per­for­mances at po­liti­cal festivals, private parties, and especially fiestas patronales, the singer knew that she had to respond to market changes in Puerto Rico and tried to create a rec­ord that would respond to her left-­leaning (though not militant) proindependence stance and her clear attraction to the melodramatic ­music she executed so well. ¡Creceremos! (We ­shall grow together!) is, of course, an echo of ¡Venceremos! (We ­shall win!), the celebrated phrase of the New Left and in the Puerto Rican context immediately connected to the Cuban Revolution. The eponymous title track opens with a fast, unrelenting tempo, unchanging high key, and uninterrupted crescendo. The lyr­ics herald an unspecified new order that ­will not be derailed by a series of subjects, from animals to social actors. The po­liti­cal “we” of the song is likewise unspecified. ¡Creceremos! includes two of Benítez’s shining recorded per­for­mances. The first is “El aumento” (The raise), which became a hit on the Puerto Rican pop charts in 1981, serving notice that the singer still had her audience and that her voice was in prime form. Tite Curet Alonso, a ­giant of Latin American The Thinking Voice  217

songwriting (known for scores of salsa classics and for having written La Lupe’s most memorable songs) wrote “El aumento” (although he is not officially billed as the songwriter).74 Curet was a genius at writing for singers whom he regarded as unique, matching songs specifically to their temperament. Curet correctly identified that Lucecita was not a sonera (something the singer recognized, while stating, correctly also, “Yo tengo la clave” [I can sing with the beat]).75 He wrote a salsa song laid out before the recording, requiring no improvisation from the singer or descargas (improvs) from the instruments. “El aumento” is not a montuno with a break followed by call and response. It is a virtuosic series of vocal leaps into progressively higher notes. “Tite says: ‘Lucy has a fabulous lower register’ and he writes something for me that starts low, goes to the mid-­register and ends in a crescendo ­toward the high notes, the song’s denouement.”76 “El aumento” alludes to salsa compositions as discourse, particularly referencing 1970s salsa’s strong social content. The song allowed Lucecita to make use of her wide register, low, ­middle, and high, to surprise listeners with her seemingly effortless, rapid switches between notes, always perfectly on pitch. “El aumento” sought to capture the moment of unrest happening in Puerto Rico ­after the long-­term effects of the failed Estado Libre Asociado and the oil crisis of 1973 became the daily routine and could no longer be considered passing crises. During the 1970s, the headlines steadily reported increases in prices from basic food staples (like locally produced coffee) to electricity and ­water rates, to gas, among many other essentials. The 1981 utier (Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y el Riego) strike pitted ­labor against the government and filled the newspaper headlines. The song’s last section dramatizes a scene of repression, specifically a police arrest of a brown-­skinned ­union leader, in obvious sympathy with the strikers from the utility com­pany. The ending featured her friends, the actor Miguel Angel Suárez and noted broadcast personality Pedro Zervigón, reviving the heterotopia of the mid1970s they had belonged to. The dramatization fades out to Lucecita’s ending improv, also in fadeout: Ya se llevaron al mulato Juan Barriento Trabaja negro trabaja y nunca llega el aumento Aumenta la gasolina, pero no aumenta mi sueldo They just arrested the mulato, Juan Barriento The black man works and works and the raise never happens They raise the prices on gasoline, but they ­don’t raise my wages

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The other shining recording of ¡Creceremos! is the medley “Romántica Luz, romántica voz” (Romantic Luz, romantic voice), a thirteen-­plus-­minute rendition of classic boleros. Po­liti­cal and sentimental still coexisted as Lucecita’s two au­then­tic natures that she refused to choose from. “Luz” is Lucecita’s given name and the name by which she was known in her inner circles. Lucecita scored a radio hit with the abridged version. “Romántica Luz, romántica voz” represented an attempt to move her away from the associations of her po­liti­cal repertoire by positing a mature, intimate Luz to the social Lucecita. As Arnaldo Cruz-­Malavé points out, Lucecita’s use of volume for creating intimacy and softness has gone unnoticed.77 Proper ­music criticism, especially among cultured listeners, often remarked that she should only sing with small ensembles and not larger orchestras, that she should forgo excess instrumentation and especially loud accompaniment and focus, instead, on the softer singing associated with the artiste and that such listeners recall from her years as a regular in the Caribe Hilton ­hotel. “Romántica Luz, romántica voz” is a brilliant example of her vocal strategy, where volume serves to cement the bond between the listener’s ear and the discursive register of intimacy. Volume relates to the “signal,” in Douglas Kahn’s initial sense, ­later developed by multiple theorists of transmission.78 Essentially, volume and signal are interconnected; a signal tries to accommodate as much volume as pos­si­ble in transmission. Lucecita clearly produced a reaction that short-­circuited the conceptual apparatus and aimed straight at transmission, initially expressed through her love of the microphone. Transport is the success of transmission. Further, by working through the theatricality of the repertoire, t­ here is no room for the illusion of identification; it is, strictly, a drama, an experience of the moment without pretense of a f­uture. This maneuver keeps the per­for­ mance focused on the execution, with the goal of centering the bond between the performer and the listener on the transmission-­transport dyad that the singer had made synonymous with truth. In a recent interview, the older Lucecita made her approach plain: “I’m selling you a love story, with characters and dialogues, and through the song I thread together a complete person for you. . . . ​You see them, ­there comes a moment when this creation materializes in your mind. When I touch you that way, a very intimate sensibility transpires.”79 The vocal per­for­mance Lucecita achieved in the medley “Romántica Luz, romántica voz” should be counted among the era’s classic per­for­mances of intimate ­music, foregrounding both vocal power and vocal intelligence.

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­After ¡Creceremos!, Lucecita resorted to producing her own rec­ ords, eventually releasing ­albums ­under her own label, Lobo. The recording label name is an homage to Isla de Lobos, an island off the eastern coast where the group I alluded to as a heterotopia —­ the one that had been responsible for the famed po­liti­cal concerts of the 1970s and had supported the artist though her period of blacklisting —­ often spent time together.80 “Lobo” is associated with self-­determination, at this point, and of necessity, of the more individual variety as the artist now strug­gled as a working musician. Lobo’s first release is Criollo Folklore (1983), Lucecita’s first attempt to time a release for the Christmas season to ensure sales, catering to the upper-­middle-­class fondness for the nativist repertoire during t­ hese festivities only. Criollo Fol­ klore is a jíbaro ­music recording. The title is not the catchiest; it has a ring of what was named música de arte at the time, that is, m ­ usic that was partially financed by the state ­because it illustrated the “cultural store­house,” the legacy or patrimonio. While one can say that Criollo Folklore is musically proficient (with the exception of terrible background vocals), it suffers from an overly pedagogical approach to the prob­lem of recovery, hinging on the basic nostalgic ploy of resurrecting jíbaro ­music while not addressing society’s debt to jíbaro musicians and even the genre itself (chapter 3). It forgets that a true revival reconceptualizes the source and keys it into con­temporary listening. Lucecita’s renditions are flawless, but the ­album’s calculus makes it sound detached. The cover is its best feature, embodying Lucecita’s call to a new cohort of fans. The ­album’s insertion of the singer into the nativist ­music of Puerto Rico, signifying authenticity, clashes with this visual content. Jochi Melero’s cover portrait of Lucecita encapsulates her 1980s diva embodiment: Lucecita looks arresting with big hair, heavy makeup, large earrings, and necklace (figure 4.16). While she had always dressed onstage and for the tele­vi­sion camera in outfits tailored to her artistic needs, her deployment of high fashion in the 1980s was qualitatively dif­fer­ent from earlier iterations. The glam creations targeted the upper bourgeoisie and carried with them social meanings that directly referenced social segregation and gender normativity. While this is a fact, it must be pointed out that this new costuming created horror too, particularly among ­those who looked upon Lucecita with disgust as a cross-­ dressing marimacha (tomboy) and did not mince words when expressing their homophobic hatred of the singer. The artist went on to develop this persona into the 1990s and revel in it.

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figure 4.16 ​The diva. Cover of the ­album Criollo Folklore, Grabaciones Lobo 001, 1983. Photo­graph by Jochi Melero.

The second Lobo release, Éxitos callejeros (1984), was apo­liti­cal, but the singer’s deployment of a thinking voice resurfaced at the intersection where fans across classes, many ­women, many queer, met as nomads outside of the po­liti­cal deadlock in the island nation.81 It is, perhaps, the most successful of Lucecita’s 1980s ­albums in terms of a complete concept and widespread reception. Dif­fer­ent from the abstract appeal of “Génesis” in the Cold War and from the liberal-­to-­left recourse to the ­people or the nation during the debacle of the 1970s, the call of this m ­ usic was to the calle (street). The meeting ground proposed was abjection, a sort of bottom power, a sentimental politics. “Éxitos callejeros” is, according to Pedro Rivera Toledo, an adaptation of a musician’s term for a repertoire played live in street festivals and other such events (“tocados en la calle”), from which most of the working musician’s income derives.82 This repertoire, in theory, diverges from the songs chosen for recording on an ­album. Therefore, in a way the title alludes to the work that Lucecita had done, toiling through years of downfall and then relative obscurity, performing for left-­wing, in­de­pen­dence, and social justice ­causes in Puerto Rico. Indeed, the concerts and continued appearances in open-­air

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events kept alive, so to speak, the artist’s symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion of such ­causes, even if her per­for­mance motifs ­were almost completely altered from the 1960s and 1970s and the politicized voice had ostensibly dis­appeared.83 All the tracks re-­create very conservative portrayals of heterosexual love, sometimes in the moment of sex, sometimes unrequited love, relating to the mass fascination with illicit sexual be­hav­ior, ravenous sexual desire, and complicated triangles. Most of the songs are about sex; examples include the ­Lucecita concert staples “Cabalgata” (Horse r­ ide), “Qué tal te va sin mí” (How are you ­doing without me), and “Decisión” (Decision). The repertoire belonged to established balada stars, like Roberto Carlos, Raphael Martos, Ángela Carrasco, and Rocío Dúrcal. It is probable that the Spanish singer Rocío Dúrcal was the primary visual model for Lucecita’s new look. In the ­album’s signature track, “Fruta verde” (Unripe fruit), copied with few modifications from Dúrcal’s 1983 recording, her per­for­mance works saucy content into a melodramatic tour de force targeting the “feminine” listener and injecting pathos into a casual song. It is a departure from the more abstract versions of love that Lucecita had represented ­until then and a vast improvement over Dúrcal’s rather bloodless interpretation. She gleefully unleashed kitsch, her main 1980s code, inciting the jouissance of soap opera in her listeners. (In fact, both versions ­were soap opera themes: Dúrcal’s was used in Spain, Lucecita’s in Argentina.) Low bud­get and low tech, the song was recorded in a makeshift studio, in the home of her former artistic director and the “Génesis” arranger, Pedro Rivera Toledo, who played most of the instruments. Rivera Toledo plays a sax solo during the song, referencing sensuality and carnal knowledge. It was squarely aimed at lowbrow taste, constructed as w ­ omen’s preference. As such, the recording went against the grain of Lucecita’s more typical masculine identifications. Fans responded with near frenzy at her encapsulation of hurt yet soulful feeling in this virtuosic power ballad. Bafflingly, Lucecita is not regularly included in lists of Spanish-­language pop divas of the time, although arguably she executed the full melodramatic form in a more masterly way than the singers on such lists. Virtuosic vocal breaks, pitch contrast, and climaxes, delivered in a haunting lower register, distinguished her from other pop stars, male and female, with their thinner, higher voices and monotonous renditions. Her delivery overcame the clichés that abounded in the songs, as all the while she cut an imposing figure in full-­length feminine gowns or elegant suits, salon hair, and sequins or star-­studded jewelry. Despite the accoutre-

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ments, she was as strikingly butch visually as ­were her per­for­mances musically, doling out pianissimos and fortissimos in equal mea­sure.84 Possibly her butchness is the reason she is excluded from diva lists. Compare her per­for­ mances to t­ hose of her counter­parts across the Spanish-­speaking world, and she emerges as unmistakably, arrestingly queer in a voice that thinks. Nostalgia (1986) would be Lucecita’s last rec­ord pressed in vinyl. Like much of her late ­career, the rec­ord is conflicted. ­After several shattering events that rent the social fabric in the 1970s (the assassinations of Santiago Mari Pesquera and Carlos Muñiz Varela, and the Cerro Maravilla murders come immediately to mind), the right wing had effectively severed the artist from the entertainment cir­cuits and the press b ­ ecause she was identified with left c­ auses.85 Nostalgia was, to a degree, a ploy to regain footing in this power­ful sector and access to the impor­tant Miami market. The ­album’s tracks offer a mélange of Cuban sones, Puerto Rican rumbas and guarachas by Rafael Hernández, Mexican standards by Agustín Lara, and one or two regional classics of the Latin American repertoire. The arrangements are fairly conventional copies of earlier 1950s recordings, intended to sound like ballroom m ­ usic. Some critics referred to this repertoire as bohemio (bohemian), but this use signified much differently than the bohemian circle Ernestina Reyes frequented (chapter  3). It was class inflected as refined and superior. The back cover features photos clearly meant to evoke the golden age. B ­ ecause of copyright disputes, the flip side was not reproduced on the cd. However, it must be recalled in order to re-­create Nostalgia’s attempt to earn market forgiveness. Nostalgia’s portrait of Lucecita made up as a Madame Butterfly character, taken by Gabriel Suau, the same photographer (and friend) who produced her iconic Afro images of the early 1970s, can be read as a defiant rejoinder to ­those who would classify her diva, hyperfeminine incarnation as grotesque. Lucecita boldly displayed her looks, her rare relationship to the camera, and her singular truth as a quin­tes­sen­tial star body. The operatic framing resonates with the virtuosity of her singing voice and reframes her ­angle of speech and expression into her third pop avatar, that of diva. The success of “Fruta verde” combined with her new persona of diva led to rec­ords where Lucecita exploited fans’ desire to hear her per­for­mance of canciones cortavenas (literally, “slit-­your-­wrists songs”), exaggerated, sentimental songs about unrequited love that re-­create a depressed affect (“Mujer sin

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tiempo” [A timeless ­woman], “Gaviota del aire” [A seagull of the wind]). Such songs ­were often featured in the soap opera programming of the Argentinian Alberto Migré, creating an audience that still follows the singer faithfully whenever she plays in Buenos Aires, screaming out their requests for vari­ous late 1980s hits. For several years she gave concerts with this concept with relative success. She enjoyed a solid following in the Southern Cone countries and often would threaten her Puerto Rican audiences by saying, “¡Me voy a la Argentina!” (I’m leaving you and g­ oing to Argentina!). Many fans believe she actually relocated to Argentina and visited Puerto Rico for professional purposes, and not the other way around. Her fandom divided into two camps. One delighted at the artist’s change and presumptive end of the long political song nightmare. Another experienced something akin to a loss of meaning, a cultural melancholia. Full disclosure: I was one of t­hose forlorn fans who continued attending concerts throughout the 1980s waiting for the real Lucecita to come back. Like all fans worth their salt, I was convinced I knew what she should sing. I did not like the repertoire, costume, affect, or anything e­lse of this 1980s incarnation. With time and study and critical listening, I’ve realized that a thinking voice lurks also in that last iconic moment of her ­career. Now in her seventies, Lucecita is still singing and occupying her role, however emptied, as La Voz Nacional de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico’s national voice). Yet no renewed iconicity emerged ­after the 1980s. Instead, she regularly recycled her three prior avatars into concerts appealing to the nostalgia market and released disparate rec­ords with wildly differing concepts, none of which took. In the neoliberal 1990s, anything could be consumed, and every­thing was flattened to suit consumption, so that her live appearances, cd releases, and rereleases of her old rec­ords all became the same cultural nationalist product, drained of a thinking voice.86 In terms of community, something she clearly cared about since she was young, the artist was left with a trite insistence on love and an unresolved demand for restitution. “Puerto Rico ­doesn’t love me,” Lucecita repeated insistently through the 1990s. Yet, as listeners ­today, we can orient our sense of hearing to what is allegorical in the voice, to its pastness, tuning into the artist’s call to restitution by listening to “the contemporaneity of the audible.”87 More than most artists of her time, Lucecita embodied and stood by voice’s desire to articulate truth and speech in unjust late colonial modernity and its celebrity culture. As an object culled from recordings, footage, recollections, archive of images, and print, through which she lives in a celebrity af224  Chapter 4

terlife, she continues to compel us to think voice. “I have always preferred to sing. Each place has its ambiance, its folks, its m ­ usic. Of course, ­people in stadiums want to dance and t­ hey’re not interested in thinking. They d ­ on’t want to be stopped in order to pause. When you sing in front of multitudes, it’s very difficult to create silences. But you can accomplish it. . . . ​I have.”88

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EPILOGUE

NOTHING IS SOMETHING Myrta Silva’s signature song, “Nada,” became an albatross ­after the 1950s. Silva was expected to perform the song well a­ fter her interest in it had waned. In footage of the early 1970s, Silva forgets the lyr­ics to “Nada” during a tribute to Rafael Hernández at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. She fi­nally blurts out, “I forgot the words. What was it, something about getting a divorce? I think I have sung this so many times my brain ­doesn’t want me to sing it again.”1 Silva is intentionally deceptive. She had performed forgetting and changing the lyr­ics to the same song before. In fact, her entire recitative had been filmed in the Banco Popu­lar 1965 tribute to Hernández. Silva was not forgetful; she was stating the musical need to move on. But the 1970s did not allow her to; the pista (canned musical accompaniment) ruled and she was reduced to lip-­syncing her own songs and changing her aesthetics to suit the increasingly corporate taste that tele­vi­sion demanded. Vocal per­for­mance on tele­vi­sion was no longer live, the meat and potatoes of Myrta. As with any entity, the nothing had an afterlife. While distinct from Silva’s marvelous play with her figure as a void, Lucecita Benítez, from “Génesis” on, created a rhizomatic nothing that updated Silva’s version. From queer masculinity (the auteur of “Génesis”), through Puerto Rico’s “wild transference” in the po­liti­cal sign in the 1970s (the artiste of “Soy de una raza pura”), to hyperfeminine yet very butch normativity (the diva of “Fruta verde”), she showed remarkable dexterity as an artist reluctantly immersed in celebrity culture and paradoxically constrained precisely by her innate star quality and capacity to transmute visually.2 Against any demand on the artist to confess to salacious truths that would ­settle and confine her voice’s meaning, throughout her c­ areer her reticence —­ her desire to signify only her persona and keep her person to herself —­ stands out. Unwittingly or not, she danced around celebrity’s strictures and kept the focus on vocal per­for­mance, impelling her

public t­ oward an exercise of thought through the sense of hearing and the act of listening. This is, in Heideggerian terms, the “gift” of the thinking voice. Along this book’s way, Ruth Fernández seemed distant from this gesture of “full emptiness” that renders the Th ­ ing as “both pres­ent and absent.”3 If Myrta Silva embodied the lewd and obscene in the face of bourgeois morality, mobilizing the ethnic against the grain of dominant culture, Fernández chose to represent a vision aligned with the dominant classes and social normativity. One interpretation of her decision is to see it as a product of having few options. Society and the m ­ usic industry impinged heavi­ly on Fernández b ­ ecause of their racist interpretation of her voice. She stressed respectability, indeed, and yet the goal of attaining respectability does not suffice to explain how, in retrospect, Fernández presented her ­career and indeed entire life as the successful product of pop­u­lism in Puerto Rico and specifically as a success story of the Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party. As she stated on a Mexican tele­vi­sion show of the early 1980s, Desnudo total (Stripped bare; a show that purported to understand the strange island in order to pres­ent its real­ity to the rest of Latin Amer­i­ca), “I got ahead in Puerto Rico thanks to the Popu­lar Party. As a ­woman. As the first black ­woman to sing. The first black ­woman to be able to sing in a first-­class ­hotel. The first black w ­ oman who could attend school. The first black w ­ oman who was elected to any senate in the world.”4 Clearly, she was well aware of her symbolic power, scoping out what kind of femininity she could assume from the nonfemininity the dominant gaze and listening imposed. Thought around this figure revolves around a particularly difficult question: Was this merely a trickster strategy or did she in fact fill her emptiness with this societal meaning, even as elite society spewed hateful racist remarks about her (out of earshot, of course)? Ernestina Reyes, as we saw, was very neatly cata­loged as the greatest of all the singers working in her genre of jíbaro m ­ usic. Although by all accounts she was very far from being a melancholy self, she was easily slotted into this nothing required by nationalist affect ­because the entire genre was formatted and packaged as a ­music of evanescence. Of the genres studied, guaracha, bolero, bomba, plena, and balada, country m ­ usic was put the most at governmentality’s ser­vice and understood the most in terms of a biopolitics of the nation, ­going as far as to classify the entirety of jíbaro as white and Hispanophile, in an example of Foucault’s “state racism.”5 ­Women appear in close to misogynistic terms, ­whether ­because of morals, lack of talent at decimar (improvisation), or as non­ex­is­tent social subjects. Out of this anonymity and

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near-­total oblivion, out of this intense polarity between adoration and derision if not hatred, the figure speaks most loudly. It should have become clear by now that I do not believe in the ideology of the ­great ­woman singer, the specificity of the female voice, the logic of ­women’s re­sis­tance, or the inherent beauty of feminine ­music. If I have studied the ­great ­woman singer, if I have put her to the test, it has been to perform a critical listening that ­will help undo ­these practices. I have taken my cue from the four singers I have studied, not as champions of anything but rather as placeholders of the nothing. I have, so to speak, played variations on this nothing throughout the book. Myrta Silva had the greatest conceptual separation from, and therefore the most theoretical understanding of, her voice. She also executed voice in many more capacities than singing, yet her vari­ous manifestations ­were masterfully connected through parlando and the extimate. Mocking fantasies about female vocalists, directly concerning herself with a radical negativity, she is truly the template for the entire book. She knew she was a phobogenic object —­ causing anxiety —­ and incorporated the anxiety she provoked into her act, aligning it perfectly with her vocal per­for­mance. The position of ­woman as doll, being surveilled constantly by the male gaze, was re-­created in the refrain from an early hit, predating her persona, penned by Rafael Hernández. Silva sang, “Mujeres, no se duerman / que los hombres las están velando” (­Women, ­don’t be caught unawares / Men are watching you). Her cadence transformed the doll into a ferocious boomerang returning a quite dif­fer­ent entity ­after “Nada,” fully owning the acousmatism of the part-object. Ruth Fernández, as a black w ­ oman singer who did not meet society’s criteria for its preferred myths about black w ­ omen as sexual objects, also had to establish a separation from the nothing she was threatened with being since her birth. She constructed a public musicality out of the void created by racist conceptions of black contralto voices. She did not relate to singing as conceptually as Silva, and her manifestations of voice outside of her own musical ­career lacked Silva’s unsettling capacity. She was unsettling to multiple quarters simply ­because her ­great voice existed and labored in a world that was not welcoming and that did not care to r­ eally listen. Hortense Spillers writes, “Frantz Fanon spoke of the ‘Negro of the Antilles’ [and by association, any Negro] as a ‘phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety.’ It would be useful to know, however, how bodies in general, respond to bodies not like our own, and what it is that ‘sees’ —­ in other words, do we look with eyes, or with the psyche?”6 228 Epilogue

Fernández allows us to ­factor in the sonic as a source of anxiety when “it is not like our own” and continue the discussion of the acousmatic part-­object of voice by drawing on racial theory and its treatment of acousmatic blackness. Do we hear with ears, or with the psyche? Ernestina Reyes’s thought pro­cess regarding her voice is opaque to us, thanks to the nature of dominant print sources, which ignored jíbaro ­music or any cultural expression that was not m ­ iddle-­or highbrow. I could not find any reportage on her per­for­mances, or interviews with the artist in any venue I consulted. A valuable trove of recordings enchants but is also, oddly enough, hard to crack open as a signifying system of the always already past, a mandate exacerbated in the case of ­women. Jíbaro singers faced a dilemma of existing dif­fer­ent from that of individuals like Ruth Fernández, who could at least aspire to be exceptions, hateful as the suppositions surrounding exceptions ­were. Country ­music singers ­were seen as cogs in a collective subject and ­were expected to represent the past, not to inhabit the modernizing pres­ent. To add insult to injury, they w ­ ere expelled from the home that much of their singing celebrated. And they barely could make a living on ­music. Such was their par­tic­u­lar nothing to bear, from which they created their lasting corpus, Ernestina Reyes among them at the hallowed top. Lucecita Benítez directly refuted any injunction to represent anything, and continues to do so. She navigated through circumstances of naked profit making, first, and life-­stifling persecution of dissidence, second. Uncannily perfect in song, she searched for silence and thought in her audiences, which she extracted through pure manipulation of vocal sound. Contrary to the “lyr­ ics to listen to” with which I began, verbal content was truly secondary. The relationship to reception was real, but abstracted, happening in another realm. In a way, her temperament is Nietz­schean, philosophical to the end, uninterested in common ideas of what one says and how. She was the beginning of the book, when I invoked her “I am nothing,” and she is the end of the book, its arrival at the thinking voice. A ­ fter the mid-1970s, she spoke of having encountered “poets” (songwriters she could relate to) and “serious poetry” or simply “poetry” (referring to stanzas that compelled her to sing them). I often wondered at her use of the poetic as a descriptor of a certain synchronicity that had eluded her in her prior repertoire and that she began to encounter in the 1970s. Giorgio Agamben wrote a treatise on the relationship of poets to their times, basing his thoughts on Nietz­sche: “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with Nothing Is Something  229

time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. ­Those who coincide too well with the epoch, t­ hose who are perfectly tied to it in e­ very re­ spect, are not contemporaries, precisely ­because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it.” Lucecita’s synchronicity was her “dys-­synchrony,” which, as Agamben helps clarify, does not mean she was nostalgic or living in another time.7 What ties ­these chapters together is their variations on a common theme of nothingness, gender, and song. Clearly, t­ here should never be a g­ reat ­woman singer, just singers; one should not have to practice defamiliarization in order to listen to ­women; one should merely react to the unmediated voice and decide on its significance, merits, or value. I have heard versions of this objection to a study of gender and voice, and t­ hese unfriendly statements have helped me grasp just how difficult the attempt to “change listening itself ” (to recall Barthes) is. Th ­ ere are a g­ reat many prejudices directed at, as well as received ideas about, ­women singers. Many are unconscious. All are problematic. I selected ­these four ­women specifically ­because, in their figures, the impossibility of this business as usual is embedded a priori. It is in this sense that I consider their ­careers as feats, not ­because they succeeded as symbols, but rather ­because they never ceased to be allegories. By insisting on their allegorical nature, in the Benjaminian sense, it should be clear that I do not advocate a utopia when singers such as ­these ­will be freed from limited to non­ex­is­tent listening. Why not listen to ­women as the social subjects they are? Can we ­really envision, within our horizon, a time when voice ­will not be grasped through gender? Should this be a goal? ­These are questions for other books. What I’ve pursued in this one is a reckoning with a sonorous past. I have set in motion a call that t­hese par­tic­u­lar existences, belonging to that past covered by gender (­here I’m riffing once more on Hortense Spillers’s discussion of the subject “covered” by race),8 be listened to with their historicity in mind. Voice is a cultural artifact, a product of culture, at the same time that singular manifestations of voice ask “big questions about their cultural moments and the crises and prob­lems of their time.”9 Th ­ ese “big questions” are sometimes posed directly, in immediately recognizable form. At o ­ thers, the questions may be more latent or implicit, slower to come to the fore. I have employed Giorgio Agamben’s archaeological method to offer a par­tic­u­lar variant of reconstruction and a par­tic­u­lar mode of archival work.10 Instead of elegiac and nostalgic, lamenting the obsolescence of so many objects and

230 Epilogue

experiences —­ or, conversely, trying to animate or resurrect them to restore the archive to its plenitude —­ I aimed for getting as close as pos­si­ble to the arkhé in order to unsettle protocols of listening and challenge the distribution of the sensible that kept —­ and possibly still keeps —­ a ­whole class of subjects on the outside it demarcates.11

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NOTES INTRODUCTION All translations from Spanish are my own. 1. Venegas Lloveras, Marzo dos, 215. 2. Diego Manso, “Lucecita Benítez: ‘Yo no canto tonterías.’ ” Revista Ñ, June 14, 2013. 3. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. 4. Le partage du sensible, the distribution of the sensible, is Jacques Rancière’s well-­ known concept. See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. 5. Feminist scholars have considerably complicated this narrative. Farah Jasmine Griffin (If You ­Can’t Be ­Free) on Billie Holiday, Judith Halberstam (Gaga Feminism) on Lady Gaga, Gayle Wald (Shout, ­Sister, Shout!) on ­Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Laura Gutiérrez (Performing Mexicanidad) on Mexican cabaret stars, Deborah R. Vargas (Dissonant Divas in Chicana M ­ usic) on the “dissonant divas” of the Texas border, Alexandra T. Vazquez (Listening in Detail) on Cuban m ­ usic, and Shane Vogel (The Scene of Harlem Cabaret) on Harlem cabaret come to mind as examples of how the study of female stars is at a much dif­fer­ent place than when I began this book a de­cade ago. Th ­ ese scholars debunk dominant narratives, in which female stars d ­ on’t have complex histories or put a ­great deal of intelligence into their per­for­mances. 6. Many works have discussed this prob­lem of listening critically. See, for example, Kun, Audiotopia, who takes his cue from his objects of study, in a move that is similar to mine in this book: “Kafka’s dog performs the same kind of critical listening that Los Tigres [del Norte] do, the same kind of listening that all of the subjects in this book do —­ a critical listening that does not necessarily reject consensus or harmony, but questions its default functionality as an apparatus of obligatory group belonging and nationalist solidarity” (16). In this book, I privilege dissonance over harmony, following Vargas, Dissonant Divas, but do not discourage and, when called for, document the positive affects that may be created by liberating “spaces of m ­ usic” (Kun, Audiotopia, 22). I do, however, query any “sanctioned citizenship as w ­ omen members” within nationalist formations (Vargas, Dissonant Divas, ix). 7. “The individual in the collective traversed by ‘race’ —­ and ­there are no known exceptions, as far as I can tell —­ is covered by it before language and its differential laws take hold.” Spillers, “ ‘All the ­Things You Could Be by Now,’ ” 378.

8. Monsiváis, “ ‘Los que tenemos unas manos que no nos pertenecen,’ ” 50. 9. Agamben, “Philosophical Archaeology,” 230. 10. Rubén Torres, “En pr al igual que en todo el mundo, la música busca la libertad” [In Puerto Rico and elsewhere, ­music searches for freedom], clipping found in the Oscar Hernández Scrapbook, Fundación Nacional para la Cultura Popu­lar, San Juan, Puerto Rico; source and exact date not available, circa 1968 or 1969. 11. Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 166, translation modified. 12. “My method is to read patterns of adjustment in specific aesthetic and social contexts to derive what’s collective about specific modes of sensual activity ­toward and beyond survival. Each chapter focuses on dynamic relations of hypervigilance, unreliable agency, and dissipated subjectivity u ­ nder con­temporary capitalism; but what ‘capitalism’ means varies a lot, as each case makes its own singular claim for staging the general forces that dominate the production of the historical sensorium that’s busy making sense of and staying attached to what­ever ­there is to work with, for life. . . . ​[Affect’s] activity saturates the corporeal, intimate, and po­liti­cal per­for­mances of adjustment that make a shared atmosphere something palpable and, in its patterning, releases to view a poetics, a theory-­in-­practice of how a world works.” Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 9, 16. 13. Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” 693. Lacan discussed the voice as a part-object in Anxiety. Mladen Dolar has brilliantly glossed Lacan’s contributions to the study of the voice (extending their application in multiple manifestations as objet a) in A Voice and Nothing More. 14. Molloy, “La flexión del género en el texto cultural latinoamericano,” 54. 15. Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians,” 357, 360. 16. Szendy, Listen, 122. 17. Glasser, My ­Music Is My Flag, 168. 18. Carpentier, “Del folklorismo musical,” 44. 19. “One day Ogilvy observed that the program for industrial development was ­going well, with hundreds of new factories, but if they w ­ ere not careful, they would turn that lovely island into an industrial park. What do you suggest? asked [Teodoro] Moscoso. ‘Well, my native island Scotland was always regarded as a barbarous place ­until Rudolph Bing went to Edinburgh and started the Edinburgh Festival. Why d ­ on’t you start a festival?’ Moscoso made a note in his l­ittle diary. Three months l­ater, he persuaded the cellist Pablo Casals to come to live in Puerto Rico and start the Casals Festival of ­Music. In one ad, instead of showing Pablo Casals just sitting ­there, playing the cello, which Ogilvy said would have been a ‘visual bromide,’ the photo­graph showed an empty room, with a cello leaning against a chair. The evocative scene, described by a creative man as ‘lit by Vermeer,’ became a classic.” Roman, The King of Madison Ave­nue, 94–95. Although Moscoso was put in charge of the Festival, as head of the Compañía de Fomento Industrial, the official invitation came directly from the governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, acting on the advice of Abe Fortas, in 1955. 20. Berlant, “On the Case,” 665. 234  Notes to Introduction

ONE ​GETTING OFF . . . ​T HE NATION 1. “I’m a winner. Yo nunca he fracasado en mi vida. Mis fracasos fueron en los primeros años . . . ​desde que yo me hice figura, ya más nunca fracasé.” Myrta Silva, interview by Gilbert Mamery, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, February 10, 1973, Díaz Ayala Collection of Latin American and Cuban ­Music, Florida International University, Miami. 2. Silva’s exact date of birth is a bit of a mystery. Accounts vary, from 1922 from 1927. Silva herself gave the date as 1925; she says she arrived in New York City just shy of turning thirteen, in 1938. Myrta Silva, “Gran serie 1: Esta es mi vida” [­Great series 1: This is my life], as told to Elsa Fernández Miralles, El Nuevo Día, February 25, 1975, 25. This self-­narrative appeared in five parts on five consecutive days. 3. See Glasser, My ­Music Is My Flag, 129–168. On the guaracha, see Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 54–56. Arcadio Díaz-­Quiñones offers a useful discussion in his “Introducción” to Luis Rafael Sánchez, La guaracha del Macho Camacho. 4. Silva, “Gran serie 1,” 25. 5. tv Radio Mirror, August 1966, 66–67. 6. Jerónimo Berenguer, “Por l­ abor en tv, Myrta Silva recibe premio de revista” [For her tv work, Myrta Silva receives magazine prize], El Mundo, July 6, 1967, 54. 7. ­Sullivan ­later apologized. See Arturo Díaz Rivero, “Myrta Silva: Yo no creo ni en Ed S­ ullivan” [Myrta Silva: I believe in nothing, not even Ed S­ ullivan], tv Guía, November 9–15, 1968, 26. 8. Myrta Silva, los compositores, su música y anécdotas [Myrta Silva, songwriters, their ­music, and their anecdotes], episode on María Grever, exact date of broadcast unknown, 1981, archives of TuTV, San Juan, Puerto Rico. 9. See Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 169–183. 10. Silva, “Gran serie 1,” 27. 11. Glasser, My ­Music Is My Flag, 116. 12. Silva, interview by Mamery. 13. Silva, interview by Mamery. 14. Pedro Malavet Vega quotes newspaper accounts of the young Silva triumphantly arriving in Puerto Rico with Rafael Hernández and the Cuarteto Victoria in 1939: “She is a fan of the bongo and one of the best maraca players around.” “Música pop­u­lar en Cuba y Puerto Rico,” 132. 15. Silva’s trademark head­scarf, which would become part of her Chencha costume, comes from this pose a la guarachera. See Robreño, quoted in Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 53. 16. Laura Gutiérrez, Rumberas in Motion (Pictures), unpublished manuscript. 17. Available on dvd as La música de Rafael Hernández. 18. I thank her friends and colleagues, the late Mariano Artau, Velda González de Modestti, and Helen Monroig, for sharing their affectionate recollections of Silva. I also thank Glenn Monroig, who characterized Silva memorably as “a power dyke in an Notes to Chapter 1  235

age of men” (Monroig, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 8, 2007), and Miguel Ángel Hernández. 19. On the polymorphously perverse, see Freud, “The Archaic Features and Infantilism of Dreams.” 20. Myrta Silva, performing live in a tribute to Rafael Hernández, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. The exact date is unknown, possibly mid-1970s. Edgardo Huertas, personal collection. With thanks to Tristana Rivera. 21. Enrique Rosado, a prominent Mexican radio pioneer, recounted how Silva’s recording of “Mis tres novios” was indelibly marked in his memory of attending the circus as a small child in Mérida (Personal communication, January 19, 2007). Silva recalled how her songs ­were played on street organs in the cities she visited (Silva, “Gran serie 1,” 26). 22. In “Musical Personae,” Philip Auslander defines musical persona as “the version of a self that a musician performs qua musician” (104) and speaks of the musician’s “front” as “a point in which per­for­mances intersect with larger social contexts” (108). Further, he writes that “musical persona varies with the per­for­mance situation, and may reflect the definition of that situation more than the musicians’ individual personalities” (110). In Auslander’s definition of musical persona, audience and genre play as large a part in the emergence of persona as does the musician’s individual temperament. Auslander indicates that the audience and genre framing might tilt the balance of a persona and that audiences are heavi­ly invested “in the per­for­mance personae they help to create” (115). 23. Nancy, Listening, 40. 24. See Auslander’s discussion of ­music and other recordings as per­for­mance in Liveness. 25. The “quilting point” is “the point at which the signifier stops the other­wise endless movement of the signification” (Jacques Lacan, quoted in Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 149). 26. It is next to impossible to translate this refrain: “Aw shucks, shucks, shucks, this rumba is driving me crazy, I’m fed up with this rumba.” 27. The early Silva correlates with the three characteristics that Donald R. Dudley identifies with the cynical life: “Cynicism was r­ eally a phenomenon which presented itself in three not inseparable aspects —­ a vagrant ascetic life, an assault on all established values, and a body of literary genres particularly well adapted to satire and pop­ u­lar philosophical propaganda” (A History of Cynicism, xi–­xii). The guaracha picaresca provided more than enough stock characters and situations to stand in for the literary genres Dudley speaks of. With thanks to Noel Luna for the reference. 28. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror; Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body. 29. Sigfredo Ariel, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, Havana, Cuba, December 22, 2006. 30. Manuel Villar, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, Havana, Cuba, December 23, 2006.

236  Notes to Chapter 1

31. The reference is to Jean-­Paul Sartre, Saint Genet. Pozo is one of Cuba’s most impor­tant musical geniuses. Tragically and mysteriously, Pozo had multiple run-­ins with the law and reportedly suffered from a violent nature. 32. René Espí, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, Havana, Cuba, December 23, 2006. 33. “In the pres­ent, yes, ­there is ‘someone.’ The ‘someone’ that perhaps w ­ ill make me feel, at long last, and that in real­ity, true love is knocking on my door. The love I have been seeking, a full, absolute, generous love, the kind that asks for nothing and gives it all. ­Will I remarry? I ­don’t know. I’m married to my ­career and the bond is too strong. Not every­body can share it.” “Myrta y el amor” [Myrta’s love life], Revista Estrellas 18, no. 228 (1987?): 63. Special issue with a forty-­three-­page spread commemorating Myrta Silva upon her death; the magazine reprinted an earlier, commemorative edition, which was vol. 4, no. 37 (1973): Myrta: ¿retiro definitivo? [Is Myrta retiring for good?] In the 1960s, Silva began to mention a one and only, doomed love that “she preferred not to remember,” and in the 1970s the tale had developed into a pregnancy lost to an accident and a tale of sacrifice to pursue her supreme object, ­music. When I tried to fact check this marriage and pregnancy, I could not find a single mention of it in the Mexican press during the year it had supposedly tran­spired, when David Silva was enjoying his peak success ­after the film Campeón sin corona and spent some time in Hollywood attempting a crossover. None of Silva’s associates that I interviewed recalled any such marriage or pregnancy or period of distress. This is not to say it absolutely could not have happened, but that Silva’s discursive turn t­ oward explaining her musical output in terms of symptoms, suffering, and splitting, as compensations for the lack of heteronormative sexuality so in evidence in her life, as well as the relative absence of suffering, strike me as typical maneuvers on the part of commercially successful artists to protect their c­ areers. I would, at the very least, urge caution when approaching self-­discourse of this melodramatic and highly subjective variety when it comes to examining an artist’s life. I would also avoid making individuals wholly responsible for their discursivity and instead regard it as a shared and self-­conscious enterprise pointing to a problematic homophobia, sexism, and moral panic around artistic repre­sen­ta­tions and the collective subject. 34. “Through her irreverent humor, singing style, and physical overendowment, she self-­parodically subverted pop­u­lar expectations of the delicate, fragile, and even sexy female singer. Although matronly, she was not at all a maternal figure but rather more of an androgynous image on tele­vi­sion, her body and voice a social space of conflicting gender expectations.” Aparicio, Listening to Salsa, 177. 35. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 335–336. 36. Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 106. Also see Evans, A Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 58–59. 37. I employ “signifierness” ­after Jacques Lacan: “it is that which has a meaning effect” (Encore, 19).

Notes to Chapter 1  237

38. Lacan elucidates the structure of the letter in the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ” demonstrating how meaning solidifies in the letter’s endless passing from hand to hand, without ever containing a settled meaning. 39. Thanks to Lena Burgos-­Lafuente for calling my attention to this song. 40. Silva, “Gran serie 4: Esta es mi vida” [­Great series 4: This is my life], February 28, 1975, 28. 41. Nancy, Listening, 16. 42. Lacan makes multiple references to emptiness, fullness, the void, and the gap in his work. See Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 71–72; Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, 20–23; and Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, 108. 43. “ ‘Chencha’ tuvo la culpa” [It’s ‘Chencha’s’ fault], Bohemia (Havana, Cuba), July 27, 1947, 41. 44. “ ‘Chencha’ tuvo la culpa,” 42. 45. “ ‘Chencha’ tuvo la culpa,” 42. 46. See Yeidy Rivero, “Spectacles of Decency: Morality as a M ­ atter of the Industry and the State,” Broadcasting Modernity, 75–101. She discusses censorship in the radio as well as the preoccupation with decency in tele­vi­sion. Also thanks to Yeidy for clarifying ­matters of censorship in Cuba as well as the fate of early Puerto Rican tele­vi­sion footage (Rivero, personal communication, March 31, 2007). 47. “Yo le daba las inspiraciones, y él componía los números” [I conceived of the sketch, and he wrote the songs]. Silva, “Gran serie 2: Esta es mi vida” [­Great series 2: This is my life] February 26, 1975, 50. 48. Silva, “Gran serie 1,” 27. In an interview, the composer stated that “Chencha la gambá” was his most pop­u­lar guaracha, and that it had broken all sales rec­ords. Don Galaor, “La musa traviesa de Ñico Saquito” [Ñico Saquito’s playful muse], Bohemia, April 6, 1949, 102. 49. See Moore’s discussion of the stage mulata in the Cuban teatro vernáculo in Nationalizing Blackness, 49–50. Moore writes, “In the guaracha and related genres, the mulata appears above all as the object of sexual desire, the epitome of wanton carnal plea­sure. . . . ​The guaracha transforms the socially oppressed and marginal condition of black and mulatto ­women at the turn of the ­century, suggesting that they ­were only interested in sex” (50). 50. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 130. 51. Silva, “Gran serie 1,” 27. 52. Szendy, Listen. 53. Lacan listed the nothing as a part-­object along with the voice in “The Subversion of the Subject.” 54. Jacques-­Alain Miller writes: “The term extimacy is constructed on intimacy. It’s not intimacy’s opposite, becuse the extimate is precisely the intimate, even the most intimate —­ since intimus in Latin is already a superlative. This word indicates, how238  Notes to Chapter 1

ever, that the intimate lies in the exterior, that it is like a foreign body.” Extimidad, 14 (my translation). 55. Silva, “Gran serie 4,” 29. 56. Velda González de Modestti, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, San Juan, Puerto Rico, March  9, 2007; Helen Monroig, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, Carolina, Puerto Rico, March 9, 2007. 57. The delirious subject is theorized across the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; see Anti-­Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. 58. I take “methexic” from Jean-­Luc Nancy’s well-­known argument in Listening: “the sonorous [is] tendentially methexic (having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion),” (10). 59. With thanks to Chiara Medina for providing me a copy of the lp and information about its genesis. 60. Foucault describes the “care of the self ” in History of Sexuality, vol. 3. His phrase “speaking truth to power” is eloquently discussed in Fearless Speech. 61. Lazo, “Three Facets of Pau Casals’ Musical Legacy.” 62. Heartfelt thanks to Patricia Vega for locating a copy of Las canciones unidas. 63. Silva, “Gran serie 1,” 29. 64. “Myrta Silva, artista polifacética” [Myrta Silva, a multitalented artist], Bohemia libre, May 2, 1962, 78. 65. Lauren Berlant, in The Female Complaint, discusses how to love the conventionality of ­women’s culture “is not to love something that constrains someone or some condition of possibility, it is another way of negotiating belonging to a world” (3). Berlant discusses sentimentality as an “intimate public” created “when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers” and makes t­hese consumers feel that the commodity expresses their most intimate feelings. Berlant’s articulation is useful b ­ ecause it allows us to comprehend Silva’s self-­discourse and her attachment to a conventional vehicle as in tune with her demand for social inclusion, not a pathological split based on speculations about her private life. Much before, the Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis had discussed melodrama as an intimate public and feminine genre created for consuming publics, especially w ­ omen, especially working-­class ­women, throughout Latin Amer­i­ca at midcentury. In this context, the bolero as commodity, as he has brilliantly written, is one of Latin Amer­i­ca’s most forceful rec­ords and vehicles of collective affect, cross-­ class relationships, and cultural belonging. See Monsiváis, “Bolero.” 66. Silva, quoted in “Dualidad artística” [Artistic duality], Revista Estrellas 18, no. 228 (1987?): 57. 67. The tale of theft found its way to late-­twentieth-­century mass culture. In 1992, Angela Meyer, a well-­known Puerto Rican actress, produced the six-­part miniseries Sylvia Rexach: Hasta el fondo del dolor (Sylvia Rexach: Into the deepest well of pain). This soap opera re-­creates the cultural accusation. Myrta Silva, played by the Puerto Rican soap opera and comedy star Gladys Rodríguez, is shown in a bar in New York Notes to Chapter 1  239

talking to Sylvia Rexach, played by Rexach’s real-­life ­daughter, also a soap opera staple of 1970s and 1980s Puerto Rico, Sharon Riley. The character Rexach tells the character Silva she is in New York to see what she can do to “get her son out of drug trou­ ble.” Rodríguez, playing Silva with an unconvincing, booming voice, asks the sobbing, hunched-­over and drunk Rexach character, “Do you need money?” Cut to the next scene, when Rexach, back from New York, still drunk and crying, confesses to her ­daughter, the character Sharon Riley, “I sold two of my ­daughters.” Bizarrely, Riley’s participation in this mini-­telenovela about her ­mother’s life, starring as her m ­ other (whom she uncannily resembles), is at odds with her appearance as the sole invited guest on Silva’s 1981 program, Myrta Silva, los compositores, sus canciones y anécdotas, in an episode that Silva devoted to Rexach’s oeuvre. Riley was warm ­toward Silva. Undeniably, the mini-­telenovela of 1992 showed crass taste given that Silva had died a death five years before that her associate, Mariano Artau, poignantly described to me as “one she did not deserve” (Artau, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, March 8, 2007). Thanks to Perry Miranda for directing me to this miniseries, and to Carlos Andres Pérez, Sección Audiovisual, Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, for providing me with a copy for research purposes. 68. On Sylvia Rexach, see Rosaura Vega Santana, “Una canción llamada Sylvia.” 69. “Fue el público latino de Nueva York quien me hizo a mí” [The New York Latino audience made me a star], Myrta Silva, “Tira y tápate” [Dodgeball], Bohemia libre puertorriqueña, January 28, 1962, A-32. 70. The Myrta Silva Show, Channel 47, exact date unknown, 1966 or 1967, YouTube, posted July 7, 2011, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=v­ QtdwHhEIwk. 71. Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 13. 72. Myrta Silva, tape of El Show de Myrta Silva, Telecadena Pérez Perry, Channel 11, wkbm-­t v, exact date of broadcast unknown, early 1970s. Edgardo Huertas, personal collection. With thanks to Tristana Rivera. 73. Žižek, “The Undergrowth of Enjoyment,” 14. 74. Artau, interview by Fiol-­Matta; González de Modestti, interview by Fiol-­Matta; Monroig, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 75. “The three main types of of parrhesiastic practice utilized by the Cynics ­were: 1) critical preaching; 2) scandalous be­hav­ior; 3) what I ­shall call the ‘provocative dialogue.’ ” Foucault, Fearless Speech, 119. Lacan discussed ethics as a subject’s relationship to their desire (“not giving ground on one’s desire,” in his famous formulation), in The Seminar of Jaques Lacan, Book VII. 76. “­Every utopian fantasy construction needs a ‘scapegoat’ in order to constitute itself. . . . ​­Every utopian fantasy produces its reverse and calls for its elimination. Put another way, the beatific side of fantasy is coupled in utopian constructions with a horrific side, a paranoid need for a stigmatized scapegoat.” Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Po­liti­cal, 100.

240  Notes to Chapter 1

77. I reference Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations”: “It is the generation by models of a real without an origin or real­ity, a hyperreal” (166). 78. Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations.” 79. Silva, live per­for­mance in Teatro Colón de Mayagüez, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, February 10, 1973, recorded by Gilbert Mamery, Díaz-­Ayala Collection of Latin American and Cuban ­Music, Florida International University, Miami. Audiocassette. 80. “¿Qué hace este niño encaramado en la cabeza de este? Miren que Mayagüez tiene una fama media rara por ahí sabe . . . ​bájate . . . ​que se baje, que baje . . . ​bueno nene, si a ti te gusta la posición y él te aguanta, que sean felices . . . ​¡festejen!” 81. Myrta Silva, los compositores, su música, y anécdotas, episode on Myrta Silva, exact date of broadcast unkown, 1981, archives of TuTV, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Related to the sinthome and queer life, see Lee Edelman’s discussion of “sinthomosexuality” in No ­Future.

TWO ​SO WHAT IF SHE’S BLACK? 1. Pedro Malavet Vega gives the date as prob­ably October 16, 1937. “Ruth Fernández,” 4. 2. Ruth Fernández, interview by Marvette Pérez, June  20–21, 1999. Latino M ­ usic Oral History Proj­ect, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. I feel deep gratitude to Marvette Pérez for providing me a copy. A second part was recorded on April 3, 2001. 3. Costa, “Ruth Fernández,” 30. 4. Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999. 5. Díaz-­Ayala, typescript, Cristóbal Díaz-­Ayala Collection of Cuban and Latin American ­Music, Florida International University, Miami, undated. 6. The invitation from Rudolph Bing is recounted in multiple sources; see, for example, Sylvia M. Lamoutte, “Alma amable de la canción” [The kind soul of song], El Nuevo Día, September 18, 1988, 7. Glenn Sauls as intermediary for Rudolph Bing also appears in multiple sources; see, for example, Marilya Agostini, “Ruth Fernández lle­ vará nuestro folklore al Metropolitan Opera House” [Ruth Fernández ­will take our folklore all the way to the Metropolitan Opera House], Bohemia de Puerto Rico, July 11, 1965, 4-­A. 7. Fernández, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, March 9, 2007. 8. Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999. 9. Eric Hobsbawm coined the phrase “the short twentieth c­ entury” in The Age of Extremes to refer to the period 1914–1991, from the First World War to the fall of the Soviet Union. 10. In 1992, Vernon Boggs observed, “One of the enigmas of Afro-­Hispanic ­music is the role of w ­ omen. While w ­ omen occupy center stage in terms of the lyr­ics, in person

Notes to Chapter 2  241

they are usually relegated to the backstage of the m ­ usic’s production and its execution. . . . ​It can be argued that the world of ­music is similar to private clubs; all-­male with exclusionary policies.” Boggs, “Latin Ladies and Afro-­Hispanic ­Music,” 109, 118. 11. For brief accounts of her ­career, see Malavet Vega, “Ruth Fernández,” and Alfredo Romero Bravo, “Ruth Fernández: Una leyenda viviente de la música pop­u­lar.” 12. I have attempted to listen to and view episodes of t­ hese shows but have thus far been unable to obtain any of this material. 13. As an older Fernández confided, “Every­one in Puerto Rico calls me Titi [Auntie] Ruth.” Fernández, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 14. Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ” 10. 15. Fernández, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 16. Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 14. 17. See Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” for an introduction to the discussion of identification. 18. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 130. 19. Mendi Obadike, quoted in Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness,’ ” 646 (“Sound may summon the presence of blackness even without the attendance of black bodies”). 20. “The tall, heavy-­set Negro [sic] says she is a mixture of Spanish nobility and African slave. However, she does not recall having any identity conflicts. ‘I’m just Ruth Fernández, Puerto Rican,’ she said.” Peggy Ann Bliss, “Singer as Senator: Ruth Fernández: I’d Put Humanity in Politics,” San Juan Star, October 16, 1971, 33. See Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999, for a detailed exposition of this self-­narrative. 21. I’m following Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and “­Little History of Photography,” for the concept of “looking back at us.” 22. Glissant, Ca­rib­bean Discourse, 120. 23. The three roots theory would become dogma in the ela. For a view that both defends and seeks to explain the dominant “three roots” theory, see Babín, “The Inhabitants,” 27–66. 24. Babín, “The Inhabitants,” 123. “I was well aware that their reception was like they had a ­little piece of Puerto Rico.” Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999. 25. The po­liti­cal arm is Operation Commonwealth; the economic arm is Operation Bootstrap; and the cultural arm is Operation Serenity. Of the three, Serenity is the most vague. It never became law but nevertheless guided cultural policy. See Serra Collazo, ed., Explorando la Operación Serenidad, for an introduction to this critically impor­tant aspect of muñocismo (the name given to the time period as well as the policies of Luis Muñoz Marín, foremost figure of the ppd, main architect of the ela, and elected governor of Puerto Rico for four successive terms, from 1948–1964). 26. I’m following Jodi Melamed’s analy­sis in Represent and Destroy. 27. “This obedient type is the rhythmical type. . . . ​Any musical experience of this type is based upon the under­lying, unabating time unit of the ­music —­ its ‘beat.’ To 242  Notes to Chapter 2

play rhythmically means, to t­hese ­people, to play in such a way that even if pseudo-­ individualizations —­ ­counter-­accents and other ‘differentiations’ —­ occur, the relation to the ground meter is preserved. . . . ​The standardized meter of dance ­music and of marching suggests the coordinated battalions of a mechanical collectivity.” Adorno, “On Popu­lar ­Music,” 460–461. 28. Costa, “Ruth Fernández,” 29. 29. Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999. 30. The architect Enrique Vivoni writes, “But material prosperity was not the only concern of the Ponce elite. The establishment and preservation of prestige as an index of ‘belonging’ and as a commodity that could, at given moments, remedy financial shortcomings, was a preoccupation of families throughout this period in which significant changes in the cultural and social scene ­were taking place.” He speaks of an “urban Brahmin class” with a “compulsion for prestige.” Vivoni Farage and Álvarez Curbelo, Hispanofilia, 222. Fernández clearly became affiliated with this class and identified with its cultural proj­ect. I thank Silvia Álvarez Curbelo for providing me with the reference. Álvarez Curbelo adds, “­There is a junction at which vari­ous musical ele­ments meet, both Creole and Afro-­Caribbean, within musically Eu­ro­pean formats. It opens up possibilities in the wide spectrum of socio-­economic positions that the audience represented. One could speak of a certain mobility through ­music” (Silvia Álvarez Curbelo, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 6, 2007). Álvarez Curbelo’s argument implicitly leads to the pivotal role of listening in cross-­class contact zones. 31. Abelardo Díaz Alfaro, “Ruth la negra, Ruth la blanca: En el homenaje a Ruth Fernández en Nueva York,” El Mundo, February 16, 1963, S-10. This article is a reprint of a speech Díaz Alfaro gave on the occasion of Fernández’s tribute in New York City for her twenty-­five-­years singing c­ areer, or­ga­nized by the Centro Cultural y Recreativo, Inc., a local Puerto Rican club. 32. Fernández, interview by Fiol-­Matta. This assertion appears in many of her interviews. 33. See Findlay’s fascinating account of turn-­of-­the-­century Ponce and the raced variations of decency and how vari­ous subjects responded to this injunction. Findlay, Imposing Decency. 34. Ruth Fernández, interview in Raíces (Banco Popu­lar, 2001), documentary. 35. Álvarez Curbelo, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 36. The first time she appears in the news rec­ord, she is not mentioned by name. In the society column in El Imparcial, ­under the title, “Comentarios sobre el último baile sabatino en El Escambrón” (Comments about last Saturday’s dance at El Escambrón), we read: “La ‘Whoopie Kids’ trajo una innovación: una cantante de sones y blues” [The Whoopie Kids introduced an innovation: a blues and son singer], October 19, 1937, 28. 37. See López’s groundbreaking chapter on Eusebia Cosme: “Re/Citing Eusebia Cosme,” in Unbecoming Blackness, 63–111. Notes to Chapter 2  243

38. For Eidsheim’s complex argument, see “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera.” She speaks of “timbral blackness” as “not the resonance of a par­ tic­u­lar type of body; instead it resonates in the listener’s ear” (646). 39. See Cristóbal Díaz-­Ayala’s account in Música cubana: del areyto a la Nueva Trova, 241. 40. Ñáñigo: El espíritu afro-­cubano de la música (Ñáñigo: The Afro-­Cuban spirit of ­music) was first released in 1955 as Montilla fm-54, with two dif­fer­ent covers, one with the additional title, Ruth Fernández Sings. It was reprinted in Spain (1956) and France (1959). 41. Lamoutte, “Alma amable de la canción,” 70. 42. See Carpentier’s disquisitions on Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla as examples. La música en Cuba, 464, 467. 43. “The conflicting tendencies of racism and cultural nationalism w ­ ere resolved through a pro­cess of stylization. . . . ​Composers used many terms to describe the pro­ cess of transforming Afro-­Cuban expression commercially including ‘purify’ (depurar), ‘make sophisticated’ (sofisticar), ‘dress with elegance’ (vestir con elegancia), and ‘universalize’ (universalizar). They accepted as given the idea that street ­music did not constitute valid expression in its own right and needed to be altered in order to increase its mass appeal.” Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 134, 135. 44. Fernández, interview by Pérez. 45. See Ochoa Gautier, Aurality. 46. Ruth Fernández, “Candilejas: Del brazo con Ruth Fernández” [From the footlights: Guided by Ruth Fernández], Alma Latina, September 15, 1962, 75. 47. “Afrocuban imagery from the past seems to have been viewed both as more picturesque and as less controversial than con­temporary expression. It could be freely reinvented on the stage with l­ittle or no regard for sociohistorical authenticity since it had never been carefully documented in its day. It had the additional advantage of avoiding sensitive issues such as con­temporary racial conflict, discrimination, and black urban poverty that other­wise might have surfaced in the dialogue of the libretto. With the abolition of slavery in the 1880s, depiction of the suffering of Afrocubans ­under colonial authorities became a relatively noncontroversial means of incorporating ‘serious’ themes into the zarzuela.” Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 138–139. 48. Díaz-­Ayala, Música cubana, 245. 49. Leticia Stella-­Serra, personal communication, October 10, 2005. 50. Orovio, Cuban ­Music from A to Z, 4. 51. Ruth Fernández, with Obdulio Morales con su Orquesta Típica Cubana y Coros, Ñáñigo: El espíritu afro-­cubano de la música (including “Mi Ochún,” “Facundo,” “Macongo,” and “Chivo que rompe tambó”), Vintage Cuba no. 40, June 3, 1958. 52. Fernández, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 53. Álvarez Curbelo explains that around this time “po­liti­cal marketing” started to coalesce and that the ppd, in par­tic­u­lar, became interested in artists for propaganda purposes. Álvarez Curbelo, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 244  Notes to Chapter 2

54. Álvarez Curbelo, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 55. “I am certain that someone of Ruth Fernández’s stature received all kinds of news regarding entertainment and ­music, news about what Cubans ­were ­doing in variety theater, about vaudev­ille, the Harlem Re­nais­sance. . . . ​All ­these influences are ­there. ­There is a sophistication in this sense to Ruth. A figure like her must be understood within this dense web. ­After singing jazz at the Casa Cabassa, she would switch to something ­else, a weepy bolero pop­u­lar in ­those days or an Afro-­Caribbean rhythm.” Álvarez Curbelo, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 56. Fernández, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 57. Agostini, “Ruth Fernández llevará nuestro folklore,” 4-­A. “Some of the words in the letter ­were erased by Ruth’s tears, when, undone by the surprise, she started to weep.” 58. Rosario Guiscafré, “Hablando con Ruth Fernández: Imposible Separar a la Cantante de la Mujer” [A conversation with Ruth Fernández: It is impossible to separate the singer from the ­woman], El Mundo, April 13, 1963, S-10. 59. Blanco, Elogio de la plena, 45. The original Spanish reads: “Por todo lo demás la plena es —­ plenamente —­ blanca.” 60. Carmen Reyes Padró, “La fiesta jíbara de Ruth” [Ruth’s jíbaro party], El Mundo, November 1, 1972, 11-­A. 61. Bliss, “Singer as Senator,” 33. 62. Alberto González, “Habla Ruth Fernández: Llegar, llega cualquiera” [Ruth Fernández speaks: Anyone can make it], Bohemia 58, no. 201 (3rd series), February 5, 1967, 52. 63. Jerónimo Berenguer, “Unos 20,000 aclaman en  N.Y. a Ruth Fernández, Aída Pujol” [Twenty thousand p ­ eople give their acclaim to Ruth Fernández, Aída Pujol], El Mundo, July 19, 1965, 15. 64. I am indebted to John Pennino, archivist of the Metropolitan Opera House, for sending me a copy of the original program sheet. The program did not include notes. 65. Agostini, “Ruth Fernández llevará nuestro folklore,” 4-­A. “Poder llevar nuestra música a un sitio así, no era otra cosa que vestir a nuestro folklore de etiqueta” [To be able to take our ­music to a place like that is nothing less than dressing up our folklore in a tuxedo]; “Ruth Fernández y Bienvenido Bustamante tienen ahora en sus manos imponer nuestra música” [Ruth Fernández and Bienvenido Bustamente now shoulder the responsibility of making our ­music heard], (6-­A). In the same article, Fernández is compared to Marian Anderson (6-­A). 66. Richard D. Freed, “­Music: Latin Rhythms at the Lewisohn,” New York Times, July 19, 1965, 30. 67. Louis Snyder, “Latin-­American Night at the Lewisohn,” New York Herald Tribune, July 18, 1965, 8. 68. Pancho Cristal, liner notes, Ruth Fernández, Yo soy la que soy [(S) lp 1132], Tico, 1966. Notes to Chapter 2  245

69. “ ‘I would be foolish to want Puerto Rico to be a state ­after traveling through the south of the United States and being treated as a second class citizen,’ she said.” Bliss, “Singer as Senator,” 33. 70. Álvarez Curbelo, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 71. Santiago-Díaz, Escritura afropuertorriqueña, 65–67, 71. 72. I have in mind Scott’s discussion of infrapolitics in Domination and the Arts of Re­sis­tance. See also Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark, on the concept of “hidden histories.” 73. The Institute for Puerto Rican Culture was founded in 1955. On the Libres de Música, María Luisa Muñoz Santaella writes, “Thanks to Law #365, submitted in the House of Representatives by its President, Ernesto Ramos Antonini, Esq., three Escuelas Libres de Música w ­ ere founded, with the objective of attaining ‘a methodical learning plan for our p ­ eople’s ­music education and of creating a favorable environment in which to foster ­music’s development, which ­will culminate in the emergence of ­music bands that ­will inordinately assist in the elevation and the ennoblement of our everyday life [vida pop­u­lar].’ This bill, approved on April 20, 1946, was signed by the Interim Governor, Manuel A. Pérez.” Muñoz Santaella, La música en Puerto Rico, 142. Muñoz Santaella adds that the Libres ­were transferred to the purview of the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture in 1950, that the conservatory was founded in 1960, and that the Libres became the conservatory’s feeder schools. The Puerto Rican Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1958: “This entity was or­ga­nized to comply with the dispositions of another bill submitted by the President of the House of Representatives, Ernesto Ramos Antonini, Esq., and was approved by the insular legislature and signed into law by the Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín, in 1957” (146). 74. The Casals Festival began in 1957. Jaime Benítez, then Chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico, first invited Casals to Puerto Rico in 1952. According to Reina Pérez, in 1955, the governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, heeding the advice of Abe Fortas, formally invited Casals to inaugurate a festival of classical ­music bearing his name. Roman states it was Teodoro Moscoso, on the advice of David Ogilvy, in 1957, shortly before the festival was inaugurated. Interested readers should not miss the spirited discussion that played out over de­ cades between Donald Thompson and Francis Schwartz on the pages of the San Juan Star, now collected in Thompson and Schwartz, Concert Life in Puerto Rico. “This festival was first conceived in 1956, to serve a number of symbolic and practical purposes. Symbolically, this was a means by which musicians and ­music lovers from the four corners of the world could assem­ble to honor Don Pablo Casals and the ­music with which he had become very closely associated. It was also spoken of as a symbolic gesture on Casals’ own part: a means by which he could honor Puerto Rico, his ­mother’s birthplace. But legislatures are seldom moved to vote heavy appropriations by sentiment alone (we hope). On the practical level of money and politics, the prime purposes w ­ ere to open a previously untapped field of tourism by placing Puerto Rico

246  Notes to Chapter 2

on the international ­music festival cir­cuit and to improve Puerto Rico’s cultural image abroad, which would have a healthy effect on general tourism and other aspects of the island’s economic development.” Donald Thompson, “The Casals Festival,” San Juan Star, May 30, 1971 (rpt., Concert Life in Puerto Rico, 119–120). Thompson points out, correctly, that the performing arts ­were never part of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture’s mandate or interest; rather, it was mandated by law to concentrate on the arts and crafts of the island’s folklore, preservation of historic buildings, publications with par­tic­u­lar mention of history and biography related to Puerto Rico, and other such endeavors. Donald Thompson, “The Culture Bills,” San Juan Star, June 14, 1980 (rpt., Concert Life in Puerto Rico, 292–293). 75. “Casals was a special person in my life. He stated that pop­u­lar ­music deserved re­spect and seriousness. He pointed out that p ­ eople thought pop­u­lar ­music was vulgar, but that ­wasn’t so. ­There is good ­music and bad ­music. I have always felt proud, and have gotten ­great satisfaction out of being able to sing.” Lamoutte, “Alma amable de la canción,” 70. 76. Irma Iris García, “Insiste inclusión de artistas de isla en espectáculos” [She insists on the inclusion of local artists in all productions], El Imparcial, January 18, 1969, 27. “In between bouts of applause, she expressed her opinion that it is a shame that tourists who visit the island hardly have opportunities to become acquainted with our folklore, that they should come h ­ ere to see the same shows they can find in their own country, while our talent has to migrate in search of opportunities. She clarified that she was not reducing anyone’s talents and is not against anyone from abroad. She just wanted to express that she was in ­favor of our local ­people.” 77. Fernández’s po­liti­cal platform in the 1970s, as she geared up for her Senate nomination, is fairly well encapsulated in Elia G. Ramos, “Soy incapaz de pedirle a mi pueblo que vote por mí” [I ­wouldn’t dream of asking my ­people to vote for me], Bohemia de Puerto Rico, June 26–­July 2, 1972, 19–21. 78. Darcia Moretti, “Ruth Fernández: Talento y corazón” [Ruth Fernández: Talent and heart], Revista Sábado, El Nuevo Día, March 31, 1973, 8. In another source, we read, “The 52-­year old singing dynamo said in an interview that being black is no handicap to elective office on an island as ‘color blind’ as Puerto Rico. Even being a w ­ oman, she believes is not much of a barrier as old prejudices crumble in this male, dominates [sic] Latin society.” Bliss, “Singer as Senator,” 33. 79. Costa, “Ruth Fernández,” 28. 80. Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999. 81. Pérez, “La Negra de Ponce,” 63–64; Costa, “Ruth Fernández,” 28–29. 82. Quoted from Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999. Appears also in Costa, “Ruth Fernández”; Lamoutte, “Alma amable de la canción”; Raíces; and Patricia Vargas, “Negra, ¿y qué?” [So what if I’m black?], El Nuevo Día, October 12, 2000, 112, among ­others. Fernández does not indicate the exact date of this event; she tells Pérez she was

Notes to Chapter 2  247

not yet out of high school and recalls being around seventeen years old. She tells Costa it was between 1936 and 1937 (Costa, “Ruth Fernández,” 31). ­These facts have not been confirmed, to my knowledge. In Moretti, “Ruth Fernández,” Fernández mentions the childhood incident (8) but not the episode at the Condado Vanderbilt she l­ater reported, which was re-­created, docudrama style, for the tv special Raíces (Roots, 2001). This would indicate a change in her repre­sen­ta­tion of racial prejudice, away from the prior insistence on racial harmony and ­toward an ethos of heroic individuality. 83. For an account of the operatic diva self-­narrative, see Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat. 84. Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999. 85. As Koestenbaum observes, “The diva’s w ­ ill to power culminates in a scene of vindication” (91). 86. Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999. 87. “Her collection of Rafaela Santos dresses is legendary.” Álvarez Curbelo, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 88. Lamoutte, “Alma amable de la canción,” 71. 89. Fernández, interview by Pérez, 1999. 90. I take this term from Eidsheim’s discussion of Marian Anderson, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera.” 91. See Santiago-Díaz’s brief but illuminating discussion of this ­album in light of “double consciousness” and the “toning down” of blackness, 55–58. “Just as with the musical expression of other black and brown artists, Fernández’s renditions illustrate pretty clearly the need for Afro–­Puerto Rican artists to downplay any affirmations of their African identity, through a parallel allegiance to dominant discourse’s postulates and formulations of national identity” (65). 92. Findlay brilliantly analyzes Ponce’s raced femininity in Imposing Decency. 93. Griffin, “When Malindy Sings,” 103. 94. “El alma de Puerto Rico Hecha Canción, Ruth Fernández, de llegar a ocupar un escaño legislativo, será la ‘Senadora que canta’ ” [If she is elected to a Senate seat, Puerto Rico’s Singing Soul, Ruth Fernández, w ­ ill be the ‘singing senator’].” Sonia Vallés, “Ruth Fernández tiene fe en humanidad, cree escaño en el Senado la hará darse más” [Ruth Fernández has faith in humanity; she believes that a Senate seat ­will make her give more of herself], El Mundo, October 22, 1972, 3-­B. 95. Alfredo Margenat, “Doña Inés ataca el pac en Mitín de Carolina” [Doña Inés attacks the Christian Action Party in Carolina], El Mundo, August 31, 1964, 17. 96. Vallés, “Ruth Fernández tiene fe en humanidad,” 3-­B. 97. Vallés, “Ruth Fernández tiene fe en humanidad,” 3-­B. 98. Ramos, “Soy incapaz de pedirle a mi pueblo que vote por mí,” 19–21. Fernández told Marvette Pérez that Luis Muñoz Marín and Felisa Rincón de Gautier had approached her to ask her if “she had ever been interested in politics.” Fernández, interview by Marvette Pérez, 2001. 248  Notes to Chapter 2

99. Fernández, interview by Pérez, 2001. 100. Thanks to Yvonne Rivera Picorelli, librarian, Comisión Estatal de Elecciones (State Elections Commission), for the copies of the ballots and for explaining electoral procedures and history to me. I discussed ­music as grid of Puerto Rican identity with Álvarez Curbelo (interview by Fiol-­Matta). 101. Desnudo total (Stripped bare). Tele­vi­sion broadcast. Channel 13 of Mexico, circa 1980. Archivo General de Puerto Rico. Filmed in Puerto Rico. 102. Desnudo total. 103. Jaime Torres Torres, “Ruth la eterna” [The eternal Ruth], El Nuevo Día, October 17, 1999, 124. 104. I use “auratic” in the Benjaminian sense. An object has aura when it manages to retain a certain inscrutability of the past and does not merely become recycled as a commodity in its technological reproduction. See “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” and “­Little History of Photography.” I’m extrapolating ­here, perhaps g­ oing against the grain of Benjamin’s singling out of visual media, to incorporate the concept into ­music as also indexical and technologically reproduced at the advent of industrial capitalism. 105. Griffin reminds us that this description of the black ­woman’s voice has been recorded since the times of slavery and into jazz: “In all ­these cases the voice is unfamiliar, uncanny, almost otherwordly” (“When Malindy Sings,” 107).

THREE ​TECHNE AND THE LADY 1. Naturally, I disagree with any hierarchical renderings, ­whether it be ­those subordinating ­women to men or among w ­ omen. I encourage readers to listen to Priscilla Flores, Anatalia Rivera (Natalia), María Esther Acevedo, Luz Celenia Tirado, Adela Hernández, Matilde Narváez, and Irma Rodríguez, among other outstanding jíbara singers. 2. Viguié News, Un amigo en New York, 1952, 16 mm film; Viguié News, Un amigo en Chicago, 1956, 16 mm film. ­These shorts advertised the ser­vices offered by the Migration Division office, including assistance in employment, social ser­vices, ­free physical examinations, identification, and education. The Chicago office, opened ­later, served Puerto Rican communities in several states in the Midwest. The Migration Division was established in 1947 by Public Law 25 and began operations in 1948 ­under the Puerto Rico Department of L ­ abor. Its stated mission was “to provide the proper guidance with re­spect to opportunities for employment and the prob­lem of adjustment usually encountered in environments which are ethnologically alien.” 3. Carmen Ortiz, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, Carolina, Puerto Rico, October 5, 2007. Heartfelt thanks to Doña Carmen for this most illuminating interview, and to Roberto Silva for putting me in touch with Mrs. Ortiz. “Sin bandera” is a bolero by Pedro Flores; “Campanitas de cristal” is one of the most famous boleros of the Latin Notes to Chapter 3  249

American repertoire, penned by Rafael Hernández. Pedro Albizu Campos, a Harvard-­ trained ­lawyer, was the revered leader of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. He suffered through multiple, cruel, and dangerous imprisonments upon the rise of Luis Muñoz Marín and the ela. 4. Accounts of her age at first pregnancy vary. I am following the facts as recounted by Ernestina’s ­sister, Carmen, during our conversation. 5. Ortiz, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 6. A décima is a ten-­verse lyric with octosyllabic verses and usually a rima consonante (a rhyme scheme in which both vowels and consonants are identical). This ancient style is shared across Latin Amer­i­ca in literary and song forms. Its origins date from Spain in the fifteenth ­century. In Puerto Rico, ­there are two trends in the décima, referred to as “culta” (literary) and “pop­u­lar” (folk). For the history of the literary form, see Lluch Vélez, La décima culta en la literatura puertorriqueña: “In Puerto Rico, the décima, of courtly origins and a rigorously classical poetic form, became the foremost expression of the pop­u­lar muse, practically substituting the romance, which had been the favorite form of pop­u­lar expression in the Iberian peninsula” (15). For an overview of the sung décima, see Escabí and Escabí, La décima. Prisco Hernández offers an excellent explanation of the art of decimar, as well as the principal kinds of seises (the traditional song form of this m ­ usic), the instruments that form the conjunto típico, the characteristics of singing and playing, and the importance of the audience-­singer connection in his ­article, “Décima, Seis, and the Art of the Puerto Rican Trovador.” See also Quintero ­Rivera, Salsa, sabor y control; and Bofill-­Calero, “Improvisation in Jíbaro ­Music.” A wealth of information is available at the Cuatro Proj­ect (www​.­cuatro​-­pr​.­org). 7. Th ­ ere are other accounts of where her name came from. See Calandria’s biogra­ phy on the Fundación Nacional para la Cultura Popu­lar (National Foundation for Popu­lar Culture) website (www​.­prpop​.­org). 8. Jaime Torres Torres, “Trovadoras: inolvidable y sufrida La Calandria” [Female singers: Calandria, an unforgettable sufferer], Por Dentro, El Nuevo Día, December 26, 2004, 8. 9. I take the phrase from Bartra, The Cage of Melancholy. 10. Agamben discusses bare life in Homo Sacer. 11. An important migrant community was in Chicago. Gilberto Almenas recalled the Teatro San Juan on Division Street, La Conga on Fullerton, La Concha on North Ave­nue, and bars La Buruquena and El Tropical. Personal communication, July 21, 2008. 12. Joaquín Mouliert “El Pitirre de Fajardo,” interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta. Naguabo, Puerto Rico, January 19, 2009. With thanks to Roberto Silva for putting me in touch with Mr. Mouliert. 13. “Educate consent” refers to Gramsci’s (Prison Notebooks) theory of hegemony as a successful manufacture of consent. 14. “Lettered city” is Ángel Rama’s groundbreaking concept; see The Lettered City.

250  Notes to Chapter 3

15. In La actualidad del jíbaro, Antonio S. Pedreira wrote, for instance, “Without taking into account certain variations, and at a glance, we can say that ­every Puerto Rican shelters a hidden jíbaro and that this jíbaro possesses the fundamental features that define a criollo, regardless of w ­ hether he lives in the countryside or in the towns. . . . ​ He is an amateur musician and composes décimas off the top of his head” (16, 19). For an anthology of the literary canon cementing the jíbaro my­thol­ogy, see Laguerre and Melón, eds., El jíbaro de Puerto Rico: Símbolo y figura, one in a series documenting Puerto Rican cultural identity that was published in the 1960s, Puerto Rico, realidad y anhelo (Puerto Rico, real­ity and hope). 16. Burgos, Desde la Escuela del Aire, 37–38. 17. According to Luis Rosario Albert (“Wonderful Island of Puerto Rico”), the state radio station name was derived from the phrase “Wonderful Island of Puerto Rico.” Jíbaro ­music was the first Puerto Rican ­music heard over its airwaves. 18. Abelardo Díaz Alfaro, “Estampas de la vida de Teyo Gracia” (Scenes from the life of Teyo Gracia), Alma Latina, November 15, 1962, 7. 19. We cannot expect Díaz Alfaro to have been a m ­ usic critic or historian, but it is absolutely stunning that this interpretation survives to this day and that con­temporary critics remain uninterested in the jíbaro genre. Quintero Rivera railed against this paucity in Salsa, sabor y control, 217–251. More recently, Bofill-­Calero (“Improvisation in Jíbaro ­Music”) also laments this paucity and summarizes the scant and mostly ethnomusicological bibliography on jíbaro ­music. 20. The original lyr­ics read (to a tune that sounds like a c­ hildren’s school hour march): Jalda arriba va cantando el pop­u­lar Jalda arriba siempre alegre va riendo Va cantando porque sabe que tendrá La confianza que ha de tenerlo contento Jalda arriba con su líder marchará Con el vate que es nuestro gobernador Jalda arriba va triunfante va subiendo Jalda abajo van los de la oposición The pop­u­lar (member of party faithful) sings while he goes uphill Uphill, but always cheerful, always laughing He sings ­because he knows he ­will have The confidence that ­will keep him happy Uphill with his leader he marches on With our bard, our governor

Notes to Chapter 3  251

Uphill he is always triumphant, always climbing Downhill goes the opposition 21. See Nazario Velasco, El paisaje y el poder, for an in-­depth analy­sis of Muñoz’s complex ideology and politics of land. 22. As mentioned in chapter  2, Serenity was never formalized in law. Muñoz referred to “serenity” and only occasionally to “Operation Serenity” in vari­ous speeches. 23. Monod, “ ‘Ev’rybody’s Crazy ’Bout the Doggone Blues,’ ” 184. 24. Similarly to Monod’s analy­sis, Marybeth Hamilton’s revision of the myths surrounding the Delta as the birthplace of the blues provide a comparative counterpoint to the construction of the Puerto Rican countryside as a pure space sheltered from history, allowing for transformations in jíbaro ­music that do respond to the changes an accelerated modernization wrought. Hamilton discusses the impact of the 1960s revival of the Delta and the extent to which this revival birthed the myth of the originary delta in the first place. Hamilton writes that “­there is another story to be told about blues ­music,” one not dependent on magic or mystery; the exact same can be said about jíbaro ­music. Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 29. 25. Critics could follow Jeffrey T. Manuel, for instance, who has questioned the creation of the “sound of plain white folk” through intellectual exegeses and recording industry market niches. On reassessing U.S. southern country ­music, Manuel writes, “A close reading of country m ­ usic history and the folklore, anthropology, and ethnomusicology from which it was derived, with a par­tic­u­lar attention to the implicit and explicit racial assumptions built into the lit­er­a­ture, suggests that such studies go beyond analy­sis of the past and may be understood as attempts at the racial classification of something as inherently fluid and hybrid as sound. Working concurrently with the commercial construction of racialized genres aimed at par­tic­u­lar market segments, country ­music scholarship inscribed whiteness back onto the history of the genre. . . . ​ Building on recent scholarship that has questioned the nature of ‘social’ claims, this article returns to a genre’s founding moments not only to make an argument about country ­music, but in the hopes of making strange the connection between musical form and social category inherent in the work of identifying a genre’s ‘social origins.’ ” Manuel, “The Sound of the Plain White Folk?,” 418. 26. Regarding Hawaiian Puerto Ricans, Ted Solís informs us, “Beginning in the 1950s, New York-­or Puerto Rico-­recorded lps featuring pop­u­lar jíbaro singers such as Ramito and Chuíto began to find their way into Hawai‘i. Many had flamboyant jackets foregrounding ste­reo­typical jíbaro symbols such as machetes, straw hats, cockfights, sugar cane fields, and the like. For many Hawai‘i Puerto Ricans, the ­albums became a foundation for subsequent re-­contact with con­temporary Puerto Rico. The recordings included most of the traditional jíbaro musical genres . . . ​many of which had not been heard or specifically named (apart from the fading memories of the oldest in the community) for de­cades. While they formed the basis for a resurgence of musical tradi252  Notes to Chapter 3

tionalism, this new mediation has made it increasingly difficult to distinguish pieces ‘learned from the parents’ from ­those acquired through ­later contact with visiting musicians from Puerto Rico and their recordings.” Solís, “ ‘You Shake Your Hips Too Much,’ ” 98. Calandria’s ­great musical coconspirator, Ramito, traveled twice to Hawai‘i, and Calandria appears in one of the photo­graphs gracing the flip cover of Ramito en Hawaii (suggesting that she also performed, despite not being given billing or being included in the rec­ord). Solís’s account illustrates how the era’s recordings and per­ for­mances came to stand in as the au­then­tic and originary jíbaro forms and how the ele­ments of persona assisted the musicians in their portrayal as the purveyors of folk ­music in places far and wide. 27. Tom Wolfe, “Ramito! Jíbaro Hero,” New York: The Sunday Herald Tribune Magazine, July 4, 1965, 12. Wolfe notes that Ramito’s single, “Yo no cambio a Puerto Rico por quinientos Nueva Yores” (I would not exchange my Puerto Rico for five hundred New York Cities), sold 200,000 copies. His description of Las Villas is memorable: “One is in Las Villas, a cluster of 15 or 20 Latin resorts in the hills and dells of the Platteskills [sic]. The Spanish Alps, as many Puerto Ricans call them —­ suddenly you are tooling through the huckleberry vistas and bambambambambim you hear the conga drums from one place and then the ­whole conjunto band as you drive by the main entrance, and you are still hearing the drums from one place when you come upon the next, the trumpets, the drums, guiros, the mambos, merengues, and it seems like you are driving up and down the dells of the Plattskills with Ca­rib­bean ­music rising up around the bend ­every time you get ­there. The villas —­ literally, country estates —­ look at first glance like road ­houses. Most of them have ­simple one-­story construction, with a lot of cinderblock and plate-­glass and electric signs, but six of them have ­hotel or motel accommodations, and taken together they are the big summer resort for New York’s 900,000 Latin-­Americans. Thousands come up in buses, the old Otis buses go yawling through the hills and dells, and thousands more come up by car, and every­body goes around from villa to villa —­ Villa Clara, Villa García, Villa Nueva, Sunny Acres, Casa Pérez, Villa Galicia, Toto’s, Los Tres Argentinos, Villa San Juan, Villa —­ yet an American comes up on all of this like . . . ​Rip Van Winkle: the travel books, the guide books never heard of it all” (12). 28. Trigo, “Anemia, Witches, and Vampires: Figures to Govern the Colony,” 70. 29. Findlay, Imposing Decency. 30. Rodríguez-­Santana, “Conquests of Death.” On ­women as mea­sures of pro­gress and objects of social policy mea­sures in the context of moral panics, see Briggs, Reproducing Empire. 31. “This everyday vio­lence, that wreaks havoc with our tried and true images of the past, sustains the machista outlook on life. You c­ an’t walk the streets of Utuado without a knife in hand; you attend the country dances with a machete; gatherings feature clubs, sticks, and German-­issue guns. Some folks attend wakes so as to look for a fight. Three Kings Eve is not that saccharin image our writers have burdened us with. Sure, Notes to Chapter 3  253

t­ here is verse, cadence and beat, but it is also ruckus, rape, and spite. The tough guys fondle the new crop of females; the guitar is brandished like a weapon; and altars are overturned in the midst of the uproar.” Picó, Los gallos peleados, 29. 32. Gilberto Almenas, personal communication. Mike Amadeo, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, Bronx, New York, August 7, 2008. Amadeo made an in­ter­est­ing observation: “Every­thing that was said about men, that’s who she was, in ­woman.” 33. Scholars have touched upon the fact that the signifier “jíbaro” carries the traces of racial ambiguity and anx­i­eties about the jíbaro’s presumed whiteness, a mythical creation of the intelligent­sia. In Undoing Empire, José Buscaglia-­Salgado traces the “mulatto” as a meta­phoric subject by considering its origins not only in the plight of Africans brought to the Ca­rib­bean in bondage but also in the always already suspect purity of the Spaniards who colonized Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Although the jíbaro is not his focus in his book, Buscaglia offers an in­ter­est­ing twist on the standard interpretation of the jíbaro’s whiteness. This critic maintains that “in the context of the plantation the jíbaro and the guajiro ­were irrevocably unstable, as was the mulatto, and according to the dictates of protocol in the socioracial annals of the viceroyalty, they ­were white only to the degree that they ­were spotted with ‘white stains’ ” (195). Also commenting on the jíbaro’s gendered whiteness, Arlene Dávila, an anthropologist, writes, “the jíbaro is usually portrayed as a white male whose main influence comes from his Spanish pre­de­ces­sors although he has a tinge of Indian heritage. An African contribution to the jíbaro is never acknowledged or emphasized, as neither is a female gender identity” (Sponsored Identities, 71–72). In a related vein, see Quintero Rivera’s excellent discussion of the genre in terms of its complex hybridity and his refutation of jíbaro ­music as merely “mountain ­music” (and, therefore, white) in Salsa, sabor y control, 217–251. 34. Silvia Álvarez Curbelo, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 6, 2007. 35. Recalling Melamed in Represent and Destroy, the ppd marks a noticeable change in the racial regime in Puerto Rico t­ oward what she terms “a formally antiracist liberal cap­i­tal­ist modernity” (1). See chapter 2. 36. Nazario Velasco includes a fascinating account of the bohí­o’s conflicted status among intellectuals as a symbol of the Puerto Rican countryside in early modernity. He usefully details how, in this con­temporary moment, it was fast being replaced in practice and discourse by the casa (house) the ppd promised the jíbaro, a suburban-­ style dwelling made of concrete. See Nazario Velasco, “Pan, casa, libertad,” in El paisaje y el poder, 271–310. His chapter title riffs on the ppd slogan of “Pan, tierra, libertad” (Bread, land, liberty), which appears as part of its logo, a clean profile of a man with a straw hat representing the jíbaro. 37. The cuatro, the most impor­tant musical ele­ment in the ensemble, plays the distinguishing melodic line of the wide variety of lines, called seises, that serve to categorize the musical corpus. The cuatro establishes the tempo and provides melodic 254  Notes to Chapter 3

embellishments that complement the singer at ­every turn, often seeming to respond to the singing with a voice of its own. Cuatro players, called maestros, are revered. Up ­until very recently, ­women cuatristas (cuatro players) ­were rare; it was absolutely a male preserve. Hernández offers a concise description of the seis that cuatristas play: “The m ­ usic to which the trovador improvises his lyr­ics is known as the seis. Th ­ ere are many va­ri­e­ties of seis, over eighty have been identified. The faster types are suitable for dancing, such as the seis zapateo and the seis chorreao, while the slower va­ri­e­ties are preferred by the trovadores for their improvisations. The most pop­u­lar of ­these slower seises are the seis celinés, the seis Andino and the seis mapeyé. Another favorite is the seis con décima (the seis with a décima), the standard from of improvised poetry. The vari­ous seises consist of an introduction and a basic harmonic pattern that is repeated in­def­initely ­until the trovador ends his improvisation. Th ­ ere are seises in both the major and the minor chords. For example, the lively seis chorreao and the melodious seis de Andino are in the major, while the highly chromatic seis celinés and the seis mapeyé are in the minor mode. The very pop­u­lar seis con décima may be taken as an example of a seis in the Phrygian mode since it consists essentially of an elaboration of the Andalusian cadence” (“Décima, Seis, and the Art of the Puerto Rican Trovador,” 22). Peter Manuel writes of the seis, “The backbone of jíbaro repertoire consists of the purely local seis and aguinaldo. Both the seis and the aguinaldo have several subvarieties, distinguished by stock melodies and harmonic progressions. They are named variously ­after places of origin (seis fajardeño, aguinaldo orocoveño), musicians (seis andino), or formal features (seis con décimas)” (Ca­rib­bean Currents, 54–55). See López Cruz, Método para la enseñanza del cuatro puertorriqueño, for musical examples. See also Quintero Rivera, Salsa, sabor, y control, 217–251. The name seis most likely came from its dance origins, referring to six c­ ouples dancing together in a choreographed manner (Manuel Alonso, quoted in López Cruz, La música folklórica de Puerto Rico, 4). Most jíbaro ­music was actually played for dancing ­until the 1960s, in terrazas, large outdoor makeshift dance spaces common in the countryside, now as extinct as the countryside itself. 38. The divedco was founded by decree of law in 1949. The American documentary filmmaker Edwin Rosskam was its first director. This ambitious proj­ect explic­itly called for graphic and visual artists, composers, and writers to come together to produce a series of educational films, booklets, and silkscreen posters to promote literacy, health campaigns, and self-­initiative proj­ects in the peasantry. Some of Puerto Rico’s most noted filmmakers ­were schooled in the divedco, and silkscreens produced by graphic artists working for the divedco are now expensive, prized artworks. The program constituted one of the most impor­tant cultural and communitarian enterprises in twentieth-­century Puerto Rico and the Ca­rib­bean. ­Music was also an area of profound achievement, in terms of both original compositions and also films documenting Puerto Rican pop­u­lar ­music. Surprisingly l­ittle has been written on the divedco. On graphic art, see Tió Fernández, El cartel en Puerto Rico. On ­music, see Thompson, Notes to Chapter 3  255

“Film ­Music and Community Development in Rural Puerto Rico.” On the role of intellectuals in film productions and print materials, see Marsh Kennerley’s excellent Negociaciones culturales. 39. With thanks to Catherine Marsh Kennerley for copies of this booklet. 40. Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 5, quoted in Ochoa Gautier, “Sonic Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification, and the Aural Public Sphere,” 210. 41. Sterne, “The Theology of Sound,” 220. 42. Fox, Real Country. Fox elucidates a similar working-­class practice in American country ­music. See especially chapter 6, “ ‘Bring Me Up in a Beer Joint’: The Poetics of Speech and Song.” “Speech saturates song, and song saturates speech and in between speech and song lies an enormous and frequently traversed zone of verbal art” (230). 43. Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 181. 44. Mouliert, interview by Fiol-­Matta. Inquiries regarding details about how she obtained her recording contract, musicians employed in recording sessions, and location of sessions proved, unfortunately, unfruitful. My interviewees did not recall much about the specifics of Calandria’s recording ­career. Interestingly, all described her voice as sweet. 45. It is believed that Ramito, despite his my­thol­ogy, did not write all the compositions with which he is credited and that a good part belong to songwriters whose names we are likely to never know, ­people he became acquainted with over the course of his ­career. As with other folk ­musics, the notion of authorship was blurry, and the question of songwriting credits was often not pursued to the letter. Musicians believed they had credit if they recorded something first. 46. Canino, “Trovadores, improvisadores, versificadores y cantadores,” 115 (emphasis added). 47. The lyr­ics read: “No conformes con la historia / los padres de la menor / escogen a Nueva York / de escuela reformatoria / mandan a la chica notoria / en este panal de colmenas / y aunque aquí la vida es buena / seis años ella vivió / pero cuando regresó / ya llevaba una docena.” (They ­couldn’t just leave it ­there / The child’s parents / selected New York / as a reformatory school / They sent the troublesome girl / to this beehive / and, even though life h ­ ere is delightful / she lived h ­ ere for six years / and by the time she returned to Puerto Rico, / she had had a dozen kids.) 48. See Rodríguez-­Santana, “Conquests of Death.” 49. See López Cruz, La música folklórica de Puerto Rico, 36–37, on the mapeyé. He believes “mapeyé” is short for “­brother Peyé” (hermano Peyé). The name for the seis mapeyé itself might allude to this male-­male bond. 50. “Porque el jíbaro o es ruiseñor o es pitirre . . .” (­Because the jíbaro is ­either a nightingale or a kingbird). Díaz Alfaro, “Estampas,” 7. 51. For “distribution of the sensible,” see Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics.

256  Notes to Chapter 3

52. Luis Miranda “El Pico de Oro,” interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico, January 16, 2009. With thanks to Roberto Silva for putting me in touch with Mr. Miranda. Matilde Narváez, “La Jíbara de Toa Alta,” also remarked that “tenía un tono muy bello” (she had a beautiful timbre). Narváez, personal communication, January 12, 2005. With thanks to Roberto Silva for the contact. 53. Ortiz, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 54. With thanks to Arturo Butler, who clarified ­matters to me in a conversation during which he discussed his personal collection of Calandria recordings. Thanks also to Mr. Butler for being so generous with his collection, enabling my access to a g­ reat number of Calandria’s tracks from the 1950s. Fi­nally, thanks to David Morales of the Cuatro Proj­ect for putting me in touch with Mr. Butler. 55. I queried the ethnomusicologist and professor of m ­ usic Jaime Bofill-­Calero about Calandria’s voice. He took my question to students in a course he was teaching at the Conservatory of ­Music in Puerto Rico and e-­mailed me with some conclusions of their discussion. The students had used the following technical, descriptive language: “Voz nasal, ronca en el registro agudo, chillona, ligeramente nasal, sonido abierto, sonido de garganta, vibrato” (A nasal voice, hoarse in the high register, shrill, slightly nasal, open sound, throaty sound, vibratos). He volunteered that the group had noticed a change from her younger voice, “Aguda y finita aun un poco inocente pero mañosa” (high-­pitched and thin, innocent-­sounding but a l­ittle crafty), and what they characterized as the voice she developed ­later, “Con más cuerpo, más swing, más ronca” (With more body, more swing, hoarser). Bofill, e-­mail communication, September 22, 2014. Thanks to Bofill-­Calero and his students for sharing their descriptions. 56. The reference is to Bourdieu’s classic, Distinction. 57. Mercedes Pérez Glass, interview by Cristóbal Díaz-­Ayala, 1991. Cristóbal Díaz Ayala Collection of Cuban and Latin American ­Music, Florida State University Libraries, Cassette 1514. 58. Ray Brack, “Money Programming: All-­Alike ­Music in Latin Locations Is Loco,” Billboard, July 16, 1966, 77, 86. 59. The track’s cuatro player, Nieves Quintero, once remarked, “I put something new into cuatro playing, something Americanized.” Nieves Quintero, “The Cuatro Proj­ ect interview with Nieves Quintero,” by Juan Sotomayor, Cuatro Proj­ect, http://­www​ .­cuatro​-­pr​.­org​/­es​/­node​/­326. 60. Moncho Osorio had returned from living in New York during the 1950s. Before that, he had served in the army. His lifelong pursuit became ­music. He is also rumored to have been involved in forms of armed strug­gle, although this remains unrecorded and as such is unverifiable. Miranda, interview by Fiol-­Matta; Egberto Almenas, e-­ mail communication, April 8, 2008; Gilberto Almenas, personal communication. The Caguas Historical Archive received the contents of Osorio’s personal collection and is in the pro­cess of cata­loguing it.

Notes to Chapter 3  257

61. Thanks to Liza Fiol-­Matta for helping me with the translations of “La Peluya” and “La infortunada,” and to Lena Burgos-­Lafuente. 62. Ortiz, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 63. Torres Torres, “Trovadoras.” 64. To listen to musical examples, see Cuatro Proj­ect (www​.­cuatro​-­pr​.­org). 65. Mouliert, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 66. Ochoa Gautier, “Disencounters between ­Music’s Allure,” 20. 67. Ochoa Gautier, “Disencounters between ­Music’s Allure,” 20. In the full article, Ochoa discusses the Colombian virtuoso vocalist Laura Pulido and the champeta musicians of the black neighborhoods of Cartagena. Regarding champeta, an “urban, self-­produced, electronic dance ­music” (20), Ochoa mentions jíbaro ­music as part of its generative sounds (21). 68. Irma Morales “La Jíbara de Salinas,” personal communication, January 12, 2005. With thanks to Roberto Silva for the contact. 69. Thanks to the Archivo Histórico de Caguas, where I was able to consult t­hese lps. 70. Mario Ortiz Jr., “Mario Ortiz and His All-­Star Band Revival: A Conversation with John Child,” Descarga​.c­ om, September 6, 2009, http://­www​.­descarga​.­com​/­cgi​ -­bin​/­db​/­archives​/­Interview60. 71. Sterne, “A Resonant Tomb,” 287–332. 72. Sterne, “A Resonant Tomb,” 298. 73. “Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Every­thing about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face —­ or rather, in a skull. . . . ​If nature has always been subject to the power of death, it is also true that it has always been allegorical.” Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 166 (translation modified).

FOUR ​THE THINKING VOICE 1. Operation Bootstrap, as discussed in preceding chapters, is the En­glish term for Manos a la Obra, in Spanish literally “put your hands to work,” the 1947 economic program intended to spur the accelerated modernization of Puerto Rico through the replacement of a rural with an industrial economy. It was the centerpiece of the 1952 founding of the current status quo, the Estado Libre Asociado (Commonwealth of Puerto Rico). The program relied heavi­ly on a corporate tax exemption for U.S. companies to operate in Puerto Rico; providing cheap ­labor costs to U.S. companies; and state-­sponsored mass migration to the United States. The heyday of Bootstrap occurred roughly between 1955 and 1970.

258  Notes to Chapter 3

2. I employ “thinking” ­after Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?: “Every­thing thought-­provoking gives us to think. But it always gives that gift just so far as the thought-­provoking ­matter already is intrinsically what must be thought about” (4). 3. “The visual is on the side of an imaginary capture (which does not imply that it is reduced to that), while the sonorous is on the side of referral/renvoi (which does not imply that it exhausts its amplitude). In still other words, the visual is tendentially mimetic, and the sonorous tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion), which does not mean that the two tendencies do not intersect.” Nancy, Listening, 10. 4. See Santiago, Nueva ola portoricensis, for wonderful documentation of this youth movement, and the two-­part tv documentary, Prohibido Olvidar: La Nueva Ola [Forgetting is forbidden: The new wave], dir. Roberto “Tito” Otero and Luis Rafael Trelles Hernández, Unidad de Cine y Televisión de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and TuTV Canales 6 y 3, 2003. 5. In Dusty!, Annie J. Randall discusses British pop’s Dusty Springfield as the greatest exponent of what Randall calls the “pop aria”: “Each pop aria does its work in a slightly dif­fer­ent way, using the orchestra to create a mood and an atmosphere appropriate to its par­tic­u­lar conceits, yet they all share a melodramatic structure in three parts: an introduction saturated with devices that fix our emotional location and point of view; at least one modal shift and/or modulation to a higher key, which leads inexorably ­toward the final payoff: the singer’s vocal breaking point” (84). ­These descriptions fit early Lucecita hits perfectly. Surely she should be counted as one of the 1960s pop aria’s foremost exponents. A splendid early example is her rendition of Pino Donaggio’s “La vita” (“La vida,” known to English-­language speakers in Shirley Bassey’s masterly version of “This Is My Life”). It could be argued that ­these hits in the internationalist festival style of the 1960s, which came from Eu­rope, laid the necessary groundwork for Lucecita’s watershed per­for­mance of “Génesis.” 6. During her years as a youth star, part of the marketing narrative used to sell rec­ords and promote El Club del Clan involved a romance between Lucecita and her costar, Chucho Avellanet, followed by heated accounts of a tempestuous romantic triangle in which Lucecita was cast as the rival of the ­daughter of Cuban exiles escaping communism, Lissette Álvarez. As fans of the period remember, a number of contests ­were held on the radio where fans daily voted via telephone for their favorite stars. Much journalistic coverage of the time claimed that Lucecita had hit the top of the charts with “Vete con ella” b ­ ecause the song faithfully revealed her emotional state, due to her rejection by her male costar, Chucho. 7. Alfred D. Herger, interview in Prohibido olvidar. 8. For an example, see Varela, La televisión criolla, on Argentina’s El Club del Clan. Herger claims he had Clark’s blessing to copy his show ­wholesale as long as he did not use any of the show’s registered trademarks. Herger recounted that he traveled to

Notes to Chapter 4  259

Philadelphia and that he had realized that the show was quite s­ imple. If it was about enlisting young ­people to dance for ­free, he figured, it would be an easy sell and a cinch to produce. Herger, interview in Prohibido olvidar. 9. Liner notes, rvlp 515. The ­album is unnamed. Rico-­Vox, 1964. 10. Diego Manso, “Lucecita Benítez: ‘Yo no canto tonterías’ ” [I ­don’t sing nonsense], Revista Ñ, June 14, 2013. 11. Guadalupe Treibel, “Soy lo prohibido” [I’m what’s forbidden], Página 12, September 28, 2012. She gives her birth year as 1948; other accounts state it was 1942. 12. Lucecita Benítez, interview in Prohibido olvidar. 13. This boyfriend was very phantasmatic. See, for example, the Bohemia cover of February 19, 1967, with a picture of the young artist and the caption, “Lucecita tiene novio” (Lucecita has a boyfriend). Inside, the article title reads: “He encontrado al hombre que me adora” (I have found a man who adores me). The reporter, Rosario Guiscafré, writes, “About him, we can tell you that he is a young man, but a few years older than her, very handsome, six feet tall, has a bright f­ uture, is very serious-­minded, is responsible, and has a lot in common with her. He is wise enough to have laughed along at all the stories that have been fabricated about her. He understands that they are typical of the entertainment industry, which takes advantage of all kinds of publicity stunts, and b ­ ecause of this they enjoy their sweet secret of three years since they met at a party even more” (42, emphasis added). 14. “La cancionista puertorriqueña Lucecita, vistiendo ropa masculina y corte de pelo a la usanza varonil, pero con personalidad muy femenina, interpretó de forma muy impresionante la canción ‘Génesis,’ en representación de Puerto Rico para obtener la mayor puntuación” (The Puerto Rican singer Lucecita, wearing masculine dress and hairdo, but with a very feminine personality, was impressive in her per­for­ mance of the song “Génesis,” representing Puerto Rico and obtaining the highest score in the competition). Ramón Inclán, “ ‘Génesis,’ canción de Puerto Rico, arriba en el Festival” [“Génesis,” a Puerto Rican song, comes out on top in the festival], El heraldo de México, May 11, 1969. As stipulated in the contract, the winning artists w ­ ere required to rec­ord their song as a 45 single and their trophy became contingent upon achieving specified sales numbers. Upon winning, Lucecita recorded “Génesis” in Mexico City and released the lp Lucecita en México, a collector’s item. The cover features Lucecita posing in the suit she wore for the competition; on the flip side, she is using the suit’s jacket like a toreador in a bullfight, certainly an in­ter­est­ing pose no doubt meant to underscore how the Mexican press received her costume as suspiciously masculine. 15. Designed by Fernando Martín, known as the designer “Martin.” 16. “An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8. 17. “In a curious bodily topology, it is like a bodily missile which separates itself from the body and spreads around, but on the other hand it points to a bodily interior, 260  Notes to Chapter 4

an intimate partition of the body which cannot be disclosed —­ as if the voice ­were the very princi­ple of division into exterior and interior.” Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 70–71. 18. “It is the ­silent voice of an appeal, a call, an appeal to respond, to assume one’s stance as the subject. . . . ​It is the voice in which the linguistic, the ethical, and the po­liti­cal voice join forces, coinciding in what was the dimension of pure enunciation in them. They are knotted together around that pivotal kernel of the object voice, of its void, and in response to it our fate as linguistic, ethical, po­liti­cal subjects has to be pulled to pieces and reassembled, traversed, and assumed.” Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 124. 19. In 2013, Lucecita, interviewed in Argentina, spoke of the contradictory affordances of her isolation at this time. On the one hand, she felt f­ ree, ­because she associated freedom with being able to pursue a ­career in ­music. On the other, she spoke of the man­ag­er’s absolute control over her as a commodity. “They forbade me to have friends. They forbade every­thing. When you make it big you ­don’t belong to yourself. You belong to the management office, Alfred in this case. Then he sold my contract to Paquito Cordero, a capo from over ­there in Puerto Rico. Herger sold me like peanuts. Then it got worse; they isolated me from every­one. I ­didn’t have a life. If I had not followed the rules of the game then, I would not be the Lucecita I am ­today. I ­would’ve gotten lost on the way.” She recounts, as in multiple interviews, that this period ended when she “ran into her conscience” shortly ­after. Manso, “Lucecita Benítez.” 20. In Vocal Tracks, Jacob Smith discusses some of the characteristics of the melodramatic voice, all of which Lucecita deployed. He covers whispering, talking, sobbing, overacting, and, in singers, pitch contrast, stretching the range of timbre, and abrupt changes in inflection. Smith comments on how “the voice is an instrument of timbre par excellence” (120) and discusses the undertheorized question of timbre in m ­ usic (117). 21. Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 107–112. 22. I’m riffing on Nancy in Listening: “[sonorous] presence arrives —­ it entails an attack, as musicians and acousticians say” (14). 23. For examples of Lucecita’s self-­discourse at this time, see the interviews by Ma­ gali García Ramis, “La transformación de Lucecita,” Avance, August 6, 1973, 20–25; Luz Raquel Ávila, “Lucecita en el Coliseo: ‘A mí no me controla nadie,’ ” Avance, November 11, 1974, 54–57; and Manuel Ramos Otero and Rosario Ferré, “Con Lucecita,” Zona carga y descarga 1, no. 6 (1973): 22–23. 24. Lucecita on The Ed ­Sullivan Show: YouTube, posted May 13, 2016, https://­www​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=4­ I​_x­ ytWdFIE; Lucecita in Tonta tonta pero no tanto: YouTube, posted December  12, 2011, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­e8dd6sdbSzM; Lucecita on the ­Toyota Rambler Show, with Sammy Davis, Jr., YouTube, posted August 2, 2007, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­C8XiSgkIH0Q. 25. I received this information from Mary Sherwood, sofa Entertainment, e-­mail communication, February 26, 2007. Notes to Chapter 4  261

26. Lucecita’s man­ag­ers sent five song choices for Lucecita. Javier Santiago recalls four of the five: “Génesis,” “­You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” “Day by Day,” and the eventual se­lection, the rumba gitana “Todas las mañanas” (Javier Santiago, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 9, 2007). Ed S­ ullivan’s ­sister had some kind of role in the Casita María in the Bronx, a helping nonprofit agency, and contacted the artist to perform at a benefit. According to Lucecita, Paquito Cordero would allow it only on the condition that she perform on The Ed ­Sullivan Show. ­Sullivan wanted her to lip sync to taped ­music, and she refused, insisting on the live orchestra accompaniment (Treibel, “Soy lo prohibido”). Pedro Rivera Toledo confirms that the contact was ­Sullivan’s ­sister. He also recalled that once she performed, ­Sullivan was amazed (Rivera Toledo, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, October 9, 2009). Cándido worked ­under separate contract. A few years before, Myrta Silva had led a protest against Ed ­Sullivan’s bigoted remarks about Puerto Rican ­women; one won­ders if ­there was any connection. 27. “He was my g­ reat teacher. Sammy, for me, is the altar. He wanted to buy out my contract from my man­ag­er to take me with him to the United States, but my man­ag­er replied I was not for sale. It has not been easy to fly to the heights.” Treibel, “Soy lo prohibido.” 28. The reference, naturally, is to Debord, Society of the Spectacle. 29. Rivero, Tuning Out Blackness, 72–85. 30. Rivero, Tuning Out Blackness, 73. 31. Rivero, Tuning Out Blackness, 73. 32. Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 180. 33. Rafael Rodríguez, “Luz Esther habla de Lucecita” [Luz Esther talks about Lucecita], Suplemento En Rojo, Claridad, August 21–27, 1981, 3. 34. We can think of Daphne Brooks’s suggestion in “Afro-­Sonic Feminist Praxis”: “­These ­women of the lower registers . . . ​push our imaginations, our desires; our quotidian needs to engage with the traces of suffering by challenging us through sound to go to (other) extremes and border regions to tarry in the bound­aries of the elsewhere. By way of their location on ­these ‘lower frequencies,’ they ‘speak for’ us” (220). 35. Rodríguez, “Luz Esther habla de Lucecita,” 3. 36. As Mita Torres reminded me, “De hecho, es rockero” (In fact, he is into rock). Torres, interview by Licia Fiol-­Matta, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, January 14, 2009. 37. Agamben, “What Is the Con­temporary?” 38. Ramos Otero and Ferré, “Con Lucecita,” 22. 39. Ramos Otero and Ferré, “Con Lucecita,” 22. 40. Ramos Otero and Ferré, “Con Lucecita,” 23. 41. No author, no title, Claridad, October 15, 1974, 20. 42. Torres, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 43. It is worth consulting Díaz, Huele a bomba.

262  Notes to Chapter 4

44. P. Z. [Pedro Zervigón?], “Concierto ‘Traigo un pueblo en mi voz’ en el Sylvia Rexach,” Avance, May 13, 1974, 60. 45. “­There are also, prob­ably in ­every culture, in e­ very civilization, real places . . . ​ which are something like ­counter-­sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are si­mul­ta­ neously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside all places, even though it may seem pos­si­ble to indicate their location in real­ity. ­Because ­these places all are absolutely dif­fer­ent from all the sites they reflect and speak about, I s­ hall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.” Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. 46. See Nancy, Being Singular Plural. “Creation takes place everywhere and always —­ but it is this unique event, or advent, only on the condition of being each time what it is, or being what it is only ‘at each time,’ each time appearing singularly” (16). 47. “Su primer concierto en vivo” [Her first live concert] Avance, April 22, 1974, 55. 48. Also presented in ­hotels, which may help explain its quite dif­fer­ent packaging. She presented this concert at the ­Hotel Helio Isla Verde in April 1975, with thirty-­ two musicians. Luz Raquel Ávila, “Lucesita quiere ser madre” (Lucecita wants to be a ­mother), Avance, April 7, 1975, 17. The turn t­ oward a repertoire dominated by Alberto Cortez songs might have been motivated by financial concerns, as it could be fitted into the ­hotel mold and also employed for love-­themed events, such as Valentine’s Day 1975 (Luz Raquel Ávila, “Lucecita interpreta a Alberto Cortés [sic] o la fuerza omnipotente del amor,” Avance, February 10, 1975, 52–53). The show was recorded for tele­vi­sion. 49. The concept appears throughout Foucault’s work but is succinctly captured in the discussion of ancient parrhesia: “a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life b ­ ecause he recognizes truth-­telling as a duty to improve or help other ­people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood and silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-­interest and moral apathy” (Fearless Speech, 19–20). 50. Ramos Otero and Ferré, “Con Lucecita,” 24. 51. Brooks, “Afro-­Sonic Feminist Praxis,” 207. 52. Moten, “Chromatic Saturation,” quoted in Brooks, “Afro-­Sonic Feminist Praxis,” 208. 53. Brooks, “Afro-­Sonic Feminist Praxis,” 209. 54. “For its full development, Puerto Rico needs, among other ­things, not only minoritarian artists enrolling in universities, but pop artists who reach universality itself from pop ­music. I think Lucecita Benítez, if she minds her art only (and not the superficial stuff that surrounds it) can become a unique, world-­class pop singer of Latin pop songs with social relevance.” “El maravilloso arte de Lucecita Benítez” [Lucecita Benítez’s marvelous art], El Mundo, November 14, 1971, 8.

Notes to Chapter 4  263

55. Weheliye, Phonographies, 45. 56. Ramos Otero and Ferré, “Con Lucecita,” 24. 57. Weheliye, Phonographies, 45. 58. Ramos Otero and Ferré, “Con Lucecita,” 23. 59. Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 12. 60. “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other and must be . . . ​a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections”; “the point is that a rhizome or multiplicity can never be overcoded.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7, 9. 61. Rafael Rodríguez, “¿Creceremos?” [We ­shall grow?], En Rojo, August 21–27, 1981, 6. 62. “I have been asked more than once to write an open letter to my fans, b ­ ecause many fans complain that I do not look ­after them like I should, that I ignore them, ­don’t love them or give the impression I r­ eally ­don’t need them in my life at all.” The letter apologizes to fans for having been “brusque,” “awkward,” and “even insulting [grosera] to some” and cites as a reason the “tensions to which we artists are subject before, during, and ­after each per­for­mance.” Lucecita states that dealing with t­hese “tensions” is the artist’s responsibility, that she had to “control herself better,” and that the artist should be more available to the fans. She accepts being the model for “la generación a go go” although not without relatively pointed jabs at negative gossip about her. “Open Letter to All of Lucecita’s Benítez’s Fans,” November 1967. Oscar Hernández Papers, Fundación Nacional para la Cultura Popu­lar, San Juan, Puerto Rico. As with several sources about the artist’s life, the fan letter, interviews in less than reputable journalistic venues, and opinions proffered in public have to be carefully vetted for their truth claims. It is unknown ­whether Lucecita herself penned this letter. However, as discourse, fan letters such as ­these reflect the mass circulation of diva prose, and this letter certainly sounds much like interviews and live sound bites the artist has delivered through the de­cades. Ephemera reflect the public’s obsession with knowing all about “their” artist, and the entertainment press reflects the sometimes irresponsible attitude of reporters in search of the scoop. Th ­ ese vari­ous modalities of pop discourse represent strug­gles around the interpretation of culture in the pop realm where, it seems, authority constantly shifts and the artist has to strenuously negotiate privacy and publicity, art and market taste. 63. Connor, “Edison’s Teeth,” 165. 64. Curiously, in one interview, she recounted, “While other kids w ­ ere playing with dolls and other ­things, I was already playing with microphones.” Rosario Guiscafré, “He encontrado al hombre que me adora” [I have found a man who adores me], Bohemia, February 19, 1967, 42. 65. Torres, interview by Fiol-­Matta. Torres explained that at around this time, wireless microphones started to hit the market, but that Lucecita refused to use them ­because they could not withstand her volume. 66. “It consists simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in par­tic­u­lar and in maintaining the same ‘evenly suspended attention’ . . . ​in the face of all that one 264  Notes to Chapter 4

hears. . . . ​To put it in a formula: [The analyst] must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ ­toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone.” Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-­Analy­sis,” 357, 360. 67. See, for example, Roy Brown, “¿La canción protesta?” [The protest song?], Suplemento En Rojo, Claridad, April 12, 1975, 12–13, where the esteemed singer-­songwriter states that part of the revolution’s mission is to liberate love (between men and ­women, it goes without saying). 68. I take the concept of the fugitive and its intervention into theories of blackness from Fred Moten. He writes, “What’s at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or what­ever externally imposed social logic —­ a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in e­ very closed circle, to break ­every enclosure. This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to ­simple interdiction nor bare transgression.” Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 179. See also Harney and Moten, The Undercommons. 69. I quote from Mowitt’s classic, “The Sound of M ­ usic in the Era of Its Electronic Reproducibility,” 193, albeit out of order: “[Perhaps] con­temporary ­music can be seen as a gateway to a new collectivity, since it situates subjects within an emergent structure of listening which offers experiential confirmation of a social confirmation.” 70. YouTube, posted September  29, 2012, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­ony​ TquV​-­jBM. 71. Nueva canción and nueva trova refer to late 1960s–­early 1970s musical movements in Chile and Cuba respectively, with a wide continental appeal. ­These ­were left-­ wing, anticommercial, often revivalist movements aligned particularly with Salvador Allende’s Popu­lar Unity Front and the Cuban Revolution, respectively. 72. Torres, interview by Fiol-­Matta. Edna Rivera was also pres­ent and confirmed this account. She is the wife of Pedro Rivera Toledo and was part of the group of artist-­ activists I characterized earlier as a “heterotopia.” A profound thank you to both Torres and Rivera for such an in­ter­est­ing and clarifying interview. Thanks also to Ida de Jesús, who put me in touch with Torres. 73. See Party’s excellent discussion of balada’s association with repressive regimes in “Placer Culpable,” 72–78. 74. Rodríguez, “Luz Esther habla de Lucecita,” 2–3. 75. “Yo soy de barrio, tengo la clave y he bailado salsa con mis hermanos y amigos” [I come from the barrio. I can follow the beat and have danced salsa with my b ­ rothers and friends]. Rodríguez, “Luz Esther habla de Lucecita,” 2. 76. Rodríguez, “Luz Esther habla de Lucecita,” 3. 77. Cruz-­Malavé, personal communication, April 16, 2015. 78. Kahn, “Art and Sound,” discusses the avant-­garde as the first to consider sound in art as more expansive than merely m ­ usic: “The theory of the avant-­garde can be described with relative ease when pegged to the familiar figure and functioning of the Notes to Chapter 4  265

phonograph, or of any technology for that ­matter. Beyond that, we can detect three figures of a more abstract character —­ vibration, inscription, transmission —­ that begin to account for how sounds are located or dislocated, contained or released, recorded or generated” (43). He continues, “The most pronounced impression produced by figures of vibration was that of spatiality, whereas inscription reduced space into impressions on a surface. . . . ​Figures of transmission combined aspects of both vibration and inscription, fusing the spatial features of vibration with the objecthood and corporeality of inscription, but exceeding them both in terms of complexity. . . . ​Vibrational space that had existed only in repre­sen­ta­tion was given breadth and depth once again by a signal silently crisscrossing space, bearing both sonic content and the objects that had been demobilized by inscription in a variety of manners. . . . ​Transmission was basically the return and invigoration of objects and bodies that had been fixed by inscription to the space implied by vibration” (45). 79. Treibel, “Soy lo prohibido.” 80. Speaking of this location, she says, during the live 1987 concert, Traigo un pueblo en mi voz: “Yo me suelo perder en esos lugares con mis amigos” [I often get lost in ­those places with my friends]. 81. Deleuze and Guattari discuss the nomad throughout A Thousand Plateaus. 82. “Musicians call it ‘playing in the street.’ It comes from the h ­ otel era. Musicians who did not play in ­hotels ­were said to play in the street.” According to Rivera Toledo, Lucecita came up with the title and concept. Rivera Toledo, interview by Fiol-­Matta. Heartfelt thanks for an illuminating conversation. Edna Rivera and Mita Torres w ­ ere also pres­ent. 83. Mita Torres clarified that, even in her flush years, Lucecita depended on fiestas patronales for her income. Torres, interview by Fiol-­Matta. 84. See Colón Zayas, “Imagen discográfica e identidades” [The ­album cover image and identities], for a perceptive analy­sis of Lucecita’s a­ lbum covers and the semiotic codes through which to discern her 1980s visual butchness. Colón follows Richard Dyer’s influential, semiotic analy­sis of lesbian stars. Colón writes, “Lucecita’s image, her repre­sen­ta­tional form, creates an aesthetics of instability. We behold a series of photographic images that show us a diva who has transformed her mood and physicality. Lucecita, the star, the persona, constructed and thought-­out, works her spectacularity from an excess of photographic images, that, in the context of a normalized society such as the Puerto Rico of the time, goes from the conformity of the first pictures, to the rejection of norms and rebelliousness of the second moment, to fi­nally arrive at a regime where she balances ­those first initial moments, equalizing them, with photos that echo the nostalgia industry and apparently neutralize the combative euphoria of her second stage. However, as we can observe, ­there is more to it than compliance. The third stage does preserve the combative, secure gesture of the g­ reat diva” (92). 85. Santiago Mari Pesquera, the son of the Socialist candidate for governor, Juan Mari Bras, was assassinated in 1976. Carlos Muñiz Varela, a young Cuban man and San 266  Notes to Chapter 4

Juan resident interested in bypassing the era’s hardline politics and sponsoring youth trips to Cuba from Puerto Rico, was assassinated in 1979. The 1978 Cerro Maravilla murders of Carlos Soto Arriví and Arnaldo Rosado Torres, two pro-­in­de­pen­dence activists, is one of the darkest chapters in Puerto Rican history. 86. ­There are, of course, peaks and valleys in her concert and recording life in the two de­cades I do not discuss ­here. Her best recording of the period, by far, is the Christmas classic Un regalo de alegría [A gift of joy], a terrific cd that shows revivalism at work in a supremely effective way and that, compared to Criollo Folklore, renounces didacticism and transmits exuberance and the joy of the title. It showcases Lucecita’s natu­ral gift for power genres (in this case, songs with a salsa tempo and sound). Her cd Live from Car­ne­gie Hall, from 2000, is also of note. Lucecita’s live per­for­mances continued through the 1990s, including memorable pre­sen­ta­tions in the Teatro Puerto Rico in the Bronx, with a reduced jazz ensemble, along with her appearances at the Festival de Claridad. In recognition of her extraordinary contributions to Claridad over the years and her po­liti­cal importance and steadfastness, Claridad named her the honoree of its festival in 2010. Th ­ ose interested in her ­later ­career should consult her serial appearances on the Banco Popu­lar Christmas specials, beginning with the 1993 Un pueblo que canta (A ­people who sing). As of this writing, her latest recording is Luz en Julia (2015), a tribute ­album to the Afro–­Puerto Rican poet and icon Julia de Burgos. It includes ten poems set to m ­ usic by Alberto Carrión. The cd features artwork from Antonio Martorell, the artist who created the landmark Lucecita (Hit Parade #70) ­album cover in 1973, associated with the track “Soy de una raza pura” and since renamed with this title a­ fter its reissue in cd. The artwork is a composite of Lucecita’s and Burgos’s portraits and reflects a sharp turn from Martorell’s earlier gesture. Interestingly, the two icons are linked by race and gender, but the end result is an ordering of e­ ither one’s fugitivity. The ­actual recording happened over a de­cade earlier, in Havana, with members of the Cuban National Symphony. The arrangements proceed along a generic, symphonic accompaniment to Lucecita’s vocals, reminiscent of Pedro Rivera Toledo’s earlier arangements. The artist, naturally, is several de­cades older than in her signal concerts in the 1970s and 1980s, but still capable of producing a mesmerizing per­for­mance. 87. Nancy, Listening, 16. 88. Treibel, “Soy lo prohibido.”

EPILOGUE 1. Silva, live per­for­mance, tribute to Rafael Hernández, Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, exact date unknown, possibly mid-1970s. Edgardo Huertas, personal collection. With thanks to Tristana Rivera. 2. Speaking of the Lacanian term “acting out,” Evans writes: “such acting out can be considered ‘transference without analy­sis’ or ‘wild transference’. He quotes Lacan’s Notes to Epilogue  267

seminar of January  23, 1963. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 3. 3. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 141. “For Lacan, the ­Thing is the empty space of thought, the suturing with which the drive imagines that it fills the black hole that always bounces back from the surface of the signifier.” Ríos Ávila, La raza cómica, 178. 4. Desnudo total [Stripped bare] (tele­vi­sion broadcast), exact date unknown, circa 1980. Channel 13 of Mexico. The episode was filmed in San Juan. Archivo General de Puerto Rico. 5. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.” 6. Spillers, “All the ­Things You Could Be by Now,” 379. 7. Agamben, “What Is the Con­temporary?,” 41. 8. Spillers, “All the ­Things You Could Be by Now,” 378. 9. Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 3. 10. Agamben, “Philosophical Archaeology.” 11. For “distribution of the sensible,” see Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics.

268  Notes to Epilogue

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INDEX acoustic mirror (Silverman), 31 Adorno, Theodor, 78 Afro-­Cuban ­music, 85 Agamben, Giorgio, 5–6, 195, 229–30 “Ahora seremos felices” (song), 19–20 Aida (opera), 94 Alabanza en la Torre de Ciales (Corretjer), 214 Albizu Campos, Pedro, 249n3 “Alcapurria” (song), 60–61 Alegres navidades borincanas (­album), 167–71 Alegrías campesinas (radio program), 123 Alfonso, Miguel (Clavelito), 123 “All-­Alike ­Music in Latin Locations Is Loco” (Brack), 151 Alliance for Pro­gress, 91 Alma Latina (journal), 127 Almenas, Gilberto, 157, 250n11, 254n32, 257n60 Almenas, Egberto, 257n60 Almorzando con Ruth Fernández (tele­vi­ sion show), 70 Álvarez Curbelo, Silvia, 81, 91, 101, 116, 133, 243n30 “Ambición al dinero” (song), 154–57, 170 American Bandstand (tele­vi­sion show), 173 Anderson, Marian, 92–93, 94 androgyny, Silva’s link to, 33 Angelitos negros (film), 5 Ansonia Rec­ords, 42, 145, 151

Arce, Inés, 123 arkhé: Agamben’s concept of, 5–6, 119–20; Benítez’s gender identity and, 184 artistic class, Fernández’s championing of, 101–5, 118 “A-­Tisket, A-­Tasket” (song), 94 Audiotopia (Kun), 233n6 Auslander, Philip, 236n22 avant-­garde, Kahn’s discussion of, 265n78 Aventurera (film), 183 “Ayer y hoy” (song), 143 Babín, María Luisa, 193, 242n23 balada, 6, 182, 217, 222, 227, 265n73 Barthes, Roland, 50, 139, 230 Baudrillard, Jean, 65, 198, 241n77 Benítez, Lucecita, 1–4, 14; Afromodernity of, 205–6; and the “Afro look,” 186–89; as artiste, 186–99; as auteur, 180–86; and black identity, assumption of, 186–99, 204–5; blacklisting of, 207–16, 261n19; body as assemblage, 183; during Cold War era, 6; as diva, 216–25; Festival de la Canción Latina won by, 180, 182; fugitivity of, 199–216; hyperfemininity ­adopted by, 217–25; industrialization in Puerto Rico and emergence of, 172–73; microphone, relationship to, 211–12, 219, 264n64; multiple artistic personas of, 205–16;

Benítez (continued ) ­ music criticism of, 210–12; New York per­for­mances by, 177–80, 265n68; queerness and, 180, 183, 184, 198, 215, 221, 223, 226; surveillance of, 186–87, 208–16; thinking voice of, 172–80; voice, description of, 194 Berlant, Lauren, 15, 234n12 Best Foreign Artist of Cuba, Silva named as, 35 Billboard magazine, 151 Bing, Rudolf, 68, 84, 241n6 biopolitics: in jíbaro ­music, 127–32, 227–28; of voice, 4–5 bios (Agamben), 133, 141 blackness: as acousmatic, 73, 82, 91, 229; in Afro-­Caribbean ­music and poetry, 73–84; Benítez’s embrace of, 186–99, 202–16; commercialization of, 90; cultural marginalization in Puerto Rico of, 125; and exoticism, 75; Fernández’s identification with, 89–101, 105–20; as normative, 101; as sonic or auditory, 73, 83–84, 108; in the tango-­congo, 54, 73 Blanco, Tomás, 73, 95 blues ­music, racist marginalization of, 129, 252n24 Boggs, Vernon, 241n10 bohemia: in Benítez’s ­music, 223; and the city of Caguas, 157; Fernández and double nature of, 80–81; Reyes, and deviant be­hav­ior associated with, 124, 140–41; Reyes, and persona of, 51–53 Bohemia (magazine), 37, 87 Bohemia libre puertoriqueña (magazine), 45, 63 Bola (crystal ball), in Silva’s per­for­ mances, 59–63 Bola de Nieve (Ignacio Villa), 89

280 Index

bolero, 6; by Fernández, 77–78, 94; Lucecita and, 6, 182–83, 219; Monsiváis on, 239n65; Reyes’s per­for­mances of, 122, 145, 249n3; Silva as bolero songwriter, 26, 51–52, 53, 63, 66; Silva’s marginalization in, 19 bomba, 50, 53; Fernández and, 81, 94, 95, 98, 109, 111; the national-­popular and, 125 Books for the ­People, 136 Boria, Juan, 83 Borinquen canta (tele­vi­sion show), 167 Boscana, Lucy, 122 bozal, 82 Brack, Ray, 151 Brau, Salvador, 126 Brisas navideñas (­album), 145–51, 167 Brooks, Daphne, 205, 208, 262n34 Brown, Roy, 214, 265n67 bugalú, 55, 98, 132; in Silva’s work, 57–59, 114, 132 bugarrón, in Silva’s work, 57 Buscaglia-­Salgado, José, 254n33 Buscando estrellas (radio show), 177 Bustamante, Bienvenido, 98 Cabán Vale, Antonio “El Topo,” 199 cabareteras, in Mexican films, 24 Cabral, Facundo, 195, 212 Caguas, Puerto Rico, 157 Camero, Cándido, 187 “Camina como Chencha” (song, 1961), 39–42 “Camina como Chencha” (song, live per­ for­mance, 1970s), 65–66 “Camina como Chencha la gambá” (song, 1946), 37, 38, 39, 73 “Camino abandonado” (song), 194–95 “Campanitas de cristal” (song), 122, 249n3 canciones cortavenas, 223–24

Canino, Marcelo, 140 Canomar recording label, 151, 155, 177 Canta la juventud (tele­vi­sion show), 175–76 Cantemos con Ruth Fernández (radio program), 70 Cantemos con Ruth Fernández (tele­vi­ sion show), 92 Capó, Bobby, 20 Carlos, Roberto, 222 Car­ne­gie Hall, 17, 70, 100, 267n86 Carpentier, Alejo, 85, 234n18, 244n42 Carrasco, Ángela, 222 Carrión, Alberto, 194–96, 199, 210, 267n86 Carrión, Camille, 200 Casals, Pau (Pablo), 10, 11, 15, 68, 102, 234n19, 246n74, 247n75 Castrillón, Félix, 143–44 Cecilia Valdés (operetta), 69, 82, 84, 89, 98, 100, 106–7 Centro Médico, 178–79 Cerro Maravilla murders, 223, 266n85 Césaire, Aimé, 102 “Chapel of Love” (song), 173 Chencha. See Silva, Myrta Chion, Michel, 28 “Chivo que rompe tambó” (song), 89 Christmas Party with La Calandria (­album), 168 Chuíto el de Bayamón. See Sánchez Erazo, Jesús Claridad (newspaper), 199, 210, 216 Clark, Dick, 173 Cold War: culture, uses of in, 99, 115, 184; “Génesis” and, 1, 181–85, 208, 221; Latin American popu­lar ­music and, 5–6; Operation Serenity and, 101–3 Colgate Show with Calandria and Clavelito (radio program), 123, 127, 145

Colón, Domingo, 68, 72, 77 colonialism, 67, 100, 102, 104, 123, 143, 173, 198 Comisión de Arte y Cultura, 117 Communist Party of Cuba, 37–38 Compañía de Fomento Industrial, 102 Compañía de Variedades Artísticas, 117 Conjunto Casino, 32 Conjunto Típico Ladí, 143–44 “Con Lucecita” (Ferré and Ramos Otero), 196–98 Connor, Steven, 211 Conservatory of ­Music, 102, 128–29 controversias, 123, 143–45, 153–57 Copland, Aaron, 94 “Coplas del payador” (song), 212–14 “Coplas jíbaras para ser cantadas” (de Burgos), 127 Cordero, Lotti, 200 Cordero, Paquito, 184, 188, 198, 208, 261n19, 262n26 Corretjer, Juan Antonio, 126, 214 Cortez, Alberto, 202, 210, 212, 263n48 Cortijo, Rafael, 50, 98, 202–5 Cortijo y su Combo, 50 Cosme, Eusebia, 83, 243n37 ¡Creceremos! (­album), 217–19 ¡Creceremos! (concert), 210 Criollo Folklore (­album), 220–21 critical biography, princi­ples of, 6–7 Cruz, Celia, 5, 86, 177 Cruz, Millito, 205 Cruz, Nena (Cuban La Calandria), 123 Cruz-­Malavé, Arnaldo, 219 Cuarteto Victoria, 19–20, 23–25, 27, 38, 235n14 cuatro, 121, 127, 134–37, 148, 151, 156, 205, 254n37 Cuban Overture (Gersh­win), 92 Cuban Revolution, 194, 207, 208, 217

Index  281

Curet Alonso, Tite, 217–18 cynical ethics, in Silva’s work, 12, 55, 64, 236n27 Das Ding, Freudian concept of, 60 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 188, 262n27 Davy, Gloria, 94 de Burgos, Julia, 126–27, 267n86 décima, 123; definition, 250n6; intellectuals, use of, 126–28; official my­thol­ogy and, 129; techne and, 139 decolonization, 69, 102 “Déjamelo ver” (song), 26 Del brazo con Ruth Fernández (tele­vi­sion show), 70 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 45, 183, 221, 239n57, 260n16, 266n81 Derrida, Jacques, autoaffectivity of voice: and Silva, 12; and Fernández, 83 Desnudo total (tele­vi­sion show), 227 de Toledo, Rina, 194 Díaz Alfaro, Abelardo, 80, 127–28, 142, 256n50 Díaz-­Ayala, Cristóbal, 68, 88, 151 discovery narrative, for w ­ omen artists, 19 Distancias (­album), 214 distribution of the sensible (Rancière), 4, 142, 231, 233n4 divedco (División de Educación de la Comunidad), 126, 136, 255n38 ­Dixie Cups, 174–75 Dolar, Mladen, 34, 59, 71–72, 184, 185, 261n18 Dominican Republic, 212 Don Juan, as speaking body (Felman), 32 “Dos idiomas en porfía” (song), 155, 156, 170 “Dr. Bugalón” (song), 57–59 Dúrcal, Rocío, 222

282 Index

The Ed ­Sullivan Show, Benítez’s appearance on, 187–88, 262n26 Eidsheim, Nina, 83–84, 244n38 El Alma de Puerto Rico Hecha Canción, 77, 79 “El aumento” (song), 217–18 “El Club del Clan” (song), 174–75 El Club del Clan (tele­vi­sion show), 173–76, 259n6 El curandero del pueblo (film), 178–79 El derecho de nacer (radionovela), 122 El Gran Show de Navidad (New York musical revue), 130–31 elites, 9, 43, 69, 73, 81, 89, 91, 114, 216 Ellis, Havelock, 139 El Mundo (newspaper), 208–9 El Nuevo Día (newspaper), 123 “Elogio de la plena” (Blanco), 73 “El que se va no hace falta” (song), 149–50 “El reloj” (song), 183 El Show de Myrta Silva (tele­vi­sion show), 59–60 “El triste” (song), 182 ¡En escena! (­album), 174–75 “En la Navidad” (song), 169 En las manos del pueblo (­album), 202–3, 207–8, 211 En Rojo (Claridad newspaper supplement), 199–200, 212, 216 epistemology of purification (Bauman and Briggs), 138 Ernestina Reyes con Mariachi (­album), 167–68 Escuelas Libres de Música, 102, 128, 246n73 “Esos no son de aquí” (song), 48–50 Espí, René, 32 Espí, Roberto, 32 Espinel, Vicente, 139

espiritismo, 65 Estado Libre Asociado (ela): establishment of, 10, 258n1; formats for popu­lar ­music and, 10, 44, 90, 124–25; founding of ­music institutions and, 102; national-­popular pedagogy and, 48–49, 126–29 Estampas de la vida de Teyo Gracia, 127–28 “An Eve­ning of Latin American ­Music” (Metropolitan Opera concert), 92–93, 95–100 Éxitos callejeros (­album), 221–22 extimacy. See Lacan, Jacques “Facundo” (song), 86–87 Fantasía boricua (Babín), 193 Félix, María, 35 Felman, Shoshana, 31–32 Fernández, Antonio, 21, 38 Fernández, Ruth, 12–13; Afro-­Cuban ­music and, 82–89; artistic class championed by, 101–5; contralto voice, of, 68–72; early ­career of, 67–68, 72–77; ela (Estado Libre Asociado), involvement with, 92, 94–95, 100–101; high fashion, passion for, 105–20; Metropolitan Opera concert at the Lewisohn, per­for­mance reviews for, 98–99; in photos, 75–77, 105–20; po­ liti­cal ­career of, 70–71, 116–18; Ponce ­music culture and, 80–81; semiclassical ­music, per­for­mance of, 79, 86, 92–101; religion and, 88–89; self-­ narrative by, 103–5; voice perceived as dissonant with her body, 68–69 Fernández Juncos, Manuel, 9 Ferré, Luis A., 182 Ferré, Rosario, 196–97, 210 Ferrer, Claudio, 154

Festival Casals de Puerto Rico, 10–11, 15, 102, 128, 197, 234n19, 246n74 Festival de Claridad, 216, 267n86 Festival de la Canción Latina, 1, 180, 182, 184, 207–8 Festival oti, 180 Fiend of Dope Island (film), 70, 107, 109 fiestas patronales, 79, 216, 217 Figueroa, Tomás, 184, 192 Findlay, Eileen, 133 First Festival of Latin Song in the World, 1. See also Festival de la Canción Latina Fitzgerald, Ella, 93 Flores, Pedro, 249n3 Flores, Priscilla, 140 “For Once in My Life” (song), 188 Foucault, Michel, 4, 12, 64, 127, 201, 227, 240n75, 263n45, 263n49 “The Four-­Storeyed Country” (González), 199 Freud, Sigmund, 8–9, 32, 73, 212 “Fruta verde” (song), 222–24, 226 Garland, Judy, 99 Gatica, Lucho, 177, 183 Gaye, Marvin, 174 “Génesis” (song), 1–6, 180–85, 191, 195, 198, 206, 208, 216, 221, 226 Gersh­win, George, 92–93 “Gitanito” (song), 193 Glass, Herman, 146–47 Glasser, Ruth, 9, 16 Glissant, Édouard, 75–76 Gómez, Damián, 199 González, José Luis, 199 González, Velda, 44, 116 Good Neighbor policy, 5, 91 grain of the voice (Barthes), 139 Grenet, Eliseo, 86

Index  283

Grever, María, 19 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 115, 233n5 guajiro, 254n33 guaracha, 235n3, 238n49; Silva’s affinity for, 16–20, 24–25, 38 Guillot, Olga, 21, 45–46, 183 Hamilton, Marybeth, 252n24 Hawai’i, Puerto Rican ­music in, 252n26 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 210, 227, 259n2 “Hello Dolly” (song), 173 Henderson, Mae, 205 Herger, Alfred D., 176–77, 179–80, 184–85, 259n8, 261n19 “Hermano dame tu mano” (song), 199. See also “Traigo un pueblo en mi voz” Hernández, Rafael, 19–20, 25, 28, 30, 48–49, 64–65, 77, 99, 114, 149, 168, 223, 226, 228, 249n3 Hernández Colón, Rafael, 116, 182 Hit Parade of Puerto Rico, 181 Hudo, Nana, 200 Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (Institute for Puerto Rican Culture), 10, 102, 226, 246n73 “I Only Want to Be With You” (song), 173 “jalda arriba” (Muñoz Marín), politics of, 128 Jalda arriba (ppd anthem), 128, 251n20 “Janitizio” (Revueltas), 98 jíbara, repre­sen­ta­tion of, 132–34 jíbaro, 9, 97, 115, 126, 128, 254n33 jíbaro ­music: by Benitez, 220; commercial recordings of, 145; in controversias, 154–57; gendered discourse on, 139–44; jukebox sales of, 151; as Puerto Rican national symbol, 126–32

284 Index

Johnson, Robert, 129 José José (Mexican pop idol), 182 Julio Roqué Orchestra, 19 “Júrame” (song), 19 Kitt, Eartha, 21 Kun, Josh, 233n6 “La Borinqueña” (Puerto Rican national anthem), 9–10 “La borrachita” (song), 77 La Calandria. See Reyes, Ernestina “La Calandria: An unforgettable sufferer” (Torres Torres), 123–24, 158 La Calandria canta . . . ​(­album), 151–54 La Calandria, “en salsa” (­album), 168–70 La Calandria Wishes You a Merry Christmas (­album), 168 Lacan, Jacques: ethics, 12, 64; extimacy, 34, 72, 133, 238n54; “full emptiness,” in Silva’s work, 37, 40, 63; gap, 238n42; letter, 34, 71, 108, 238n38; linguisterie, 82–83; part-­object, 8, 45, 66, 234n13, 238n38; “policy of the ostrich,” 71; real, 60; signifierness, 34, 36, 41, 237n37; sinthome, 66; ­Thing, 227, 267n3 La correspondencia (radio program), 122 La Escuela del Aire (radio program), 127 “La finquita de La Calandria” (song), 155 La hora del volante (radio program), 121, 123 “La infortunada” (song), 158, 162–67, 170 “La jíbara se va” (song), 148–49 La Lupe, 5, 21, 53, 218 Lamarque, Libertad, 5, 87, 91–92 “Lamento borincano” (song), 114, 115 “Lamento de un boricua” (song), 76–77, 115 La Montaña Canta (radio program), 157 Landestoy, Rafael “Bullumba,” 111

La Negra de Ponce, 70, 109, 113 Lanty, Milagros, 111 “La Peluya” (song), 158–62, 170 Lara, Agustín, 77, 168, 223 Las canciones unidas (film), 48–49 Laserie, Rolando, 86, 177 Las Hermanas Reyes, 122 La Sonora Matancera, 35 Las Villas, 130, 253n27 latinidad, 22 latinoamericanismo, 97 “La verdad” (song), 202–5, 214. See also “Le Lo Lai” La Voz Nacional de Puerto Rico, 224 “Le Lo Lai” (song), 202, 204, 205. See also “La verdad” Lennon, John, 175 lettered city (Rama), 126, 250n14 Lewisohn Stadium, 92–94 Liberace, 21 A Lincoln Portrait (Copland), 94 listening: acousmatic blackness, Eidsheim’s discussion of, and, 83–84; arrangement as (Szendy), 39; change listening itself (Barthes), 230; the contemporaneity of the audible (Nancy) and, 224; critical listening, 4, 55, 57, 173, 228, 233n6; emergent structure of (Mowitt), 212; as methexic (Nancy), 239n58, 259n3; psychoanalytic (distracted) listening, 8–9; pop voice and, 12; resonance of (Nancy), 29, 173, thinking voice and, 173, 224 “The ­Little Train of the Caipira” (Villa-­ Lobos), 98 Live from Car­ne­gie Hall (­album), 267n86 Lloréns Torres, Luis, 126 Lobo rec­ord label, 220 López, Betzaida “Bebé,” 199 Los dos gigantes (­album), 151–55

Los gallos peleados (Picó), 133 Los Hijos del Arte (radio program), 68 Los Panchos, 35 Lucecita en acción . . . ​! (­album), 185–86 Lucecita Hit Parade #60 (­album), 189 Lucecita Hit Parade #61 (­album), 189, 190 Lucecita Hit Parade #70 (­album), 189–91, 196–97, 267n86 Lucecita en la intimidad (­album), 186–87 Luz en Julia (­album), 267n86 Macho Camacho’s Beat (Sánchez), 199 “Mami” (song), 26 Manuel, Jeffrey T., 252n25 mapeyé, 137–38, 142, 254n37, 256n49 Marcano, Piquito, 151, 177 Marcuse, Herbert, 197 Mari Bras, Juan, 266n85 Mari Pesquera, Santiago, 223, 266n85 Martha and the Vandellas, 173 Marti, Mona, 122 Martorell, Antonio, 190, 267n86 Martos, Raphael, 222 Meléndez Muñoz, Miguel, 126 Melero, Jochi, 220 Metropolitan Opera House, 70, 84, 92–101 Migré, Alberto, 224 Mingo and His Whoopee Kids, 67–68, 72, 74, 119 Miranda, Carmen, 5 Miranda, Luis, “El Pico de Oro,” 143 “Misa de Gallo” (song), 169 “Mis tres novios” (song), 27–28, 30, 34, 37, 40, 236n21 “Mi toro barcino” (song), 137–38, 142 Molloy, Sylvia, 8 “Money Programming” (series, Billboard magazine), 151 Monod, David, 129, 132

Index  285

Monsiváis, Carlos, 239n65 Montaner, Rita, 5 Montilla, Fernando, 84 Montilla Rec­ords, 84 Moore, Robin, 38, 73 Morales, Irma, “La Jíbara de Salinas,” 167 Morales, Obdulio, 84, 86, 88 Morales Ramos, Florencio (Ramito), 121, 123, 136–37, 139, 140, 151–57, 168, 252n26, 253n27, 256n45 Morrin phonetic method of En­glish learning, 93–94 Moscoso, Teodoro, 102, 234n19, 246n74 Moten, Fred, 192, 208, 265n68 Motown, visual references to: in Benítez, 174–75; in Fernández, 107 Mouliert, Joaquín, “El Pitirre de Fajardo,” 126, 139–40, 166 Mowitt, John, 265n69 “Mujeres, no se duerman” (song), 228 mulata figure: Fernández and, 111–14; in teatro bufo, 24, 38, 44, 238n49 Munar, Alfredo, 98 Muñiz, Tommy, 167 Muñiz Varela, Carlos, 223, 266n85 Muñoz, José Esteban, 19, 30 Muñoz Marín, Luis, 76–78, 91, 100–101, 103, 115, 127–28, 132, 242n25 “Muriendo nuestra cultura” (song), 141–42, 256n47 My ­Music Is My Flag (Glasser), 9 Myrta Silva, Canta canciones mi mamá no me enseñó (­album), 53–55 Myrta Silva con Orquesta: Camina como Chencha (­album), 42–43, 56 Myrta Silva presenta: Una hora contigo (­album), 45–46, 64 The Myrta Silva Show (tele­vi­sion show), 17, 52

286 Index

Myrta Silva y Daniel Santos en tv (­album), 50 “Nací llorando” (song), 142 Nación postmortem (Pabón), 215 “Nada” (song), 25, 30–31, 33–34, 36–37, 40–41, 63–65, 124, 226–28 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 29, 173, 202 Ñáñigo (­album), 68, 84–89, 98, 106–7 Narciso descubre su trasero (Cruz), 71 National Foundation for Popu­lar Culture of Puerto Rico, 84 Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, 249n3 National Symphony of Cuba, 88, 267n86 National Voice of Puerto Rico, Benítez as, 3 Native Cuban Orchestra and Chorus, 84, 87 Negrete, Jorge, 35, 91 Ngai, Sianne, 33 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 229–30 “No soy de aquí” (song), 195 nomad (Deleuze and Guattari), 221 Nostalgia (­album), 223 nueva canción, 216, 265n71 nueva trova, 216, 265n71 Ochoa Gautier, Ana María, 85–86, 166–67 Ogilvy, David, 10–11, 234n19 oil crisis of 1973, Puerto Rican politics and, 199, 218 Operation Bootstrap, 101–2, 125, 129, 132, 157, 172, 178–79, 242n25, 258n1 Operation Commonwealth, 242n25 Operation Serenity, 77–78, 101–2, 125, 128, 242n25, 252n22 orality, 72, 127, 139 Oréfiche, Armando, 68 orisha tradition, 88–89

Orovio, Helio, 88–89 Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra), 102 Ortiz, Carmen, 122–23, 141, 144, 158 Ortiz, José Ángel, “El Jíbaro de Yauco,” 141–42 Ortiz, Mario, 168–69 Ortiz Piñero, Francisco, 136 Osorio, Ramón, “Moncho,” 157, 257n60 “Oubao Moin” (song), 214–15 Pabón, Carlos, 215 Palés Matos, Luis, 73 Pan-­Americanism, 91; Fernández, musical repre­sen­ta­tion of, 98–101 Pan-­Latino aesthetic: in Fernández, Lewisohn concert, 98; in jíbaro ­music, 134; in U.S. ­music industry, 23–24 parlando (speech-­song), 12; Silva’s use of, 27–28, 30, 54, 57–58, 228 Parra, Violeta, 6 parrhesia (Foucault), 12, 204, 240n75, 263n49 Partido Popu­lar Democrático (ppd). See Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño (psp), 199–200 Party, Daniel, 217 pava, 97, 115,134, 145, 152, 167 Pavone, Rita, 183 Pedreira, Antonio S., 126, 132, 251n15 Peña, Lito, 98, 109, 119–20 Pérez, Martha, 98, 147 Pérez, Marvette, 68, 103, 106 Pérez, Perla, 147–48 Pérez Glass, Mercedes, 151 Pérez Prado Orchestra, 37 Picó, Fernando, 133 pie forzado, 123

“Piénsalo bien” (song), 77 Playboy magazine, Latino protests against, 17 plena, 50; Blanco’s characterization of, 73, 95; Fernández and, 81–84, 94, 95, 109, 111; the national-­popular and, 125 poesía afroantillana (Afro-­Antillean poetry), 72, 82–84, 93–94 politics: in Benítez’s ­music, 199–216; Fernández and, 13, 70–71, 101–13, 114–18 Ponce, Puerto Rico, ­music culture of, 75, 80–81, 93, 91, 114, 116, 243n30 Ponce Massacre, 67 “Po Po Po” (song), 82–84 Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party (Puerto Rico): anthem of, 128, 251n20; Fernández and, 70–72, 91–92, 114–20, 227; governmentality and, 44; origin narrative of Puerto Rican culture and, 129, 254n36; pava symbol used by, 97, 134; po­liti­cal marketing and, 117–18, 244n53; race policies of, 71, 77, 101, 254n35; Reyes and, 121, 137–44 popu­lar ­music: Adorno opinion of, 242n27; Casals opinion of, 247n75; changed Puerto Rican soundscape of, 180; divedco films and, 255n38; Fernández and debates over twentieth-­century role of, 93–100; ela (Estado Libre Asociado) proj­ect and, 10, 44, 80, 90; evolution of commercialized jíbaro ­music and, 128–32; gender and accounts of, 5, 7,18, 21, 141; grid of identity as, 116; Latin American ­women in, 2–5; thought in, 14 “Por algo será” (song), 35–37 Pozo, Chano, 32, 237n31 “Preciosa” (song), 49 Puente, Tito, 53

Index  287

Puerto Rico canta (­album), 153–54 Puerto Rico canta y baila (­album), 53, 55 puertorriqueñidad, 97 Pujol, Aída, 98 puntos guajiros (Cuban country ­music), 123 Quiñones Vidal, Rafael, 122 Quintero, Nieves, 257n29 Radillo, Teófilo, 86 radio: Benítez blacklisted on, 224; Benítez in radio competitions, 259n6; Benítez’s appearances on, 177; Fernández’s ­career and, 67, 68, 69–70, 102; jíbaro ­music on, 129, 251n17; the jíbaro myth disseminated in, 126–28; in Puerto Rico, 91, 93, 102; Reyes appearances on, 121–23, 145; Silva censorship in Cuba, 37–38; Silva’s ­career and, 60; Silva’s per­for­mances in Cuba, 36–37 Radio 1010 station (Cuba), 37–38 Radio Ethics Commission (Cuba), 37–38 radionovelas, 122 Raíces (documentary), 81, 118–20 Ramito. See Morales Ramos, Florencio Ramito en controversia con La Calandria (­album), 153 Ramos Antonini, Ernesto, 102–3 Ramos Otero, Manuel, 196–97, 210 ranchera musical tradition, 123, 145 rancheras, 13–14, 91 rca Victor, 9; Silva tribute by, 21 “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis” (Freud), 8–9 religion: Fernández on, 88–89; in “La Peluya,” 161–62 “Respeta mi pollo” (song), 167–68 revisionist historiography, Puerto Rican history and, 199–200

288 Index

Revista Avance (journal), 200, 202 Revista Estrellas (magazine), 61–63, 237n33 Revueltas, Silvestre, 98 Rexach, Sylvia, 51–52, 239n67, 240n68 Reyes, Ernestina (La Calandria), 13–14; bohemia identity of, 124, 140–41, 157; The Colgate Show with Calandria and Clavelito (radio program) and, 122–23, 127; in controversias, 123, 143–44, 154– 57; debt, as motif in her work, 166–71; early ­career of, 121–22; La Montaña Canta (radio program) and, 157; ­later recordings by, 167–70; migration to New York by, 125–26, 145, 167; musical personas of, 145–46, 151–53; New York per­for­mances by, 130–32; 1960s rec­ords by, 145–57; photos for ­album covers of, 151–54; race and class and ­career of, 133; self-­reference in work of, 158–66; in Trulla educational film, 136–38; voice, descriptions of, 140, 142–43, 146–47, 167 Rhapsody in Blue (Gersh­win), 92 rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari), 210, 226, 264n60 Rijos, Patricio “Toribio,” 136 Rincón de Gautier, Felisa (Doña Fela), 114 Rivera, Danny, 199, 217 Rivera, Maso, 136 Rivera Toledo, Pedro, 184, 192, 197, 202, 205, 212, 215, 221–22 Rivero, Yeidy, 191–92 Rodríguez, Adalberto, “Machuchal,” 178 Rodríguez, Rafael, 210 Rodríguez-­Santana, Ivette, 133, 142 Rohena, Roberto, 53 Roig, Gonzalo, 82, 84 Romance musical (film), 87

“Romántica Luz, romántica voz” (medley), 219 Rosario Goyco, Felipe (Don Felo), 136 Rosskam, Edwin, 255n38 Ruth Fernández con la Orquesta Panamericana de Lito Peña, 105–7 Ruth Fernández, Es de Borinquen, con Machito y su Orquesta, 106–7 The Ruth Fernández Show (tele­vi­sion show), 70 Ruth Fernández Sings, 106–8 Saludo a mi islita (­album), 171 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 199 Sánchez Erazo, Jesús, “Chuíto el de Bayamón,” 123, 127, 136–37, 140, 143, 153–54, 162 Sanromá, Jesús María, 21 Santiago-­Díaz, Eleuterio, 101 Saquito, Ñico. See Fernández, Antonio Sauls, Glen, 68, 241n6 Schwartz, Francis, 246n74 seis, 123, 129, 139, 250n6, 254n37 “Seis contra twist” (song), 154–56, 170 self-­reference: by Reyes, 158–71; Silva’s practice of, 12, 40 Seminar XX, Encore (Lacan), 34 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 102 Serrat, Joan Manuel, 195, 212 Sevilla, Ninón, 182–83 Siete días con el pueblo (concert series), 213–16 signal (Kahn), 78, 265n78 Silva, Awilda, 63 Silva, David, 66, 237n33 Silva, Myrta, 12; ankle bracelet worn by, 43; birth date of, 235n2; as bolero songwriter, 19, 26, 51–52, 66; “Camina como Chencha” recordings, 38–42; censorship of, 26, 37, 38, 51, 52, 65,

238n46; Chencha, Silva’s persona as, 29–30, 34–45, 53–54; 65–66; cynical ethics of, 12, 64; developed understanding of her own voice, 18–20; early ­career of, 19–20, 26–30; on failure, 16; lesbianism of, 17–18, 32–33, 41, 43, 235n18; Madame Chencha, Silva as, 59–65; musical techniques of, 21–22; Myrta as signifier, 29, 33–36, 38, 43, 55; “Nada” as signature song of, 30–37, 108, 226; 1960s relocation to New York of, 52–54; personal life of, 26, 237n33; queer negative virtuosity of, 19, 30, 36, 45, 53; timbalera, first ­woman certified as, 21; voice as acousmatic, 28–29, 34–37, 45, 48–49 Silverman, Kaja, 31 Simionato, Giulietta, 99 Simone, Nina, 205 simulacrum (Baudrillard), 3, 184, 198 simulation (Baudrillard), 65 “Sin bandera” (song), 122, 249n3 sinthome, of Silva, 66 sinthomosexuality (Edelman), 241n81 “Sobrenatural” (song), 177, 180 Solís, Ted, 252n26 “Somos boricuas” (song), 148 soneo, Silva’s per­for­mance of, 35, 37, 40 Sosa, Jorge, 199 Sosa, Mercedes, 199, 214 “Soy de una raza pura” (song), 190–94, 196–99, 226, 267n86 speaking body (Felman), 31–32, 33, 56 Spillers, Hortense, 5, 228, 230 Springfield, Dusty, 173, 259n5 state influence in Puerto Rican culture, 10, 126–32, 136–44 statehood, 76–77, 182 Sterne, Jonathan, 139, 171 Suárez, Miguel Ángel, 200, 218

Index  289

Suau, Gabriel, 189, 200, 223 ­Sullivan, Ed, 186–87, 262n26; Latino protests against, 17–18, 235n7 “Summertime” (song), 94 Szendy, Peter, 9, 39 Taíno culture, resurgence in Puerto Rico of, 215–16 tango-­congo, 38, 73, 82, 86 “Tanila” (song), 84 teatro bufo, 24, 38, 44 Teatro Hispano, 17, 20, 38, 70 Teatro Puerto Rico, 17, 70, 92, 130, 134–35, 177, 267n86 tele­vi­sion: Benítez on, 173–76, 187–89; Fernández’s ­career with, 69–70; in Puerto Rico, 102; Reyes appearances on, 121, 136–38, 167; Silva on, 16–17, 44–47, 52–54, 59–61 Terrell, Tammi, 174 thinking voice: of Benítez, 7–8, 172–80, 183, 198–99, 221, 223–24, 259n2; of Fernández, 90, 120; of Reyes, 170; of Silva, 28, 57, 66 Thompson, Donald, 246n74 “three roots” theory (Babín), 77, 193, 215, 242n23 timbalera musicians, Silva as example of, 21–22 “Tira y tápate” (column), 45–47, 52, 57, 64 Tira y tápate (tele­vi­sion program), 44–46, 53, 59–65 “Tira y tápate” (song), 64 “Todas las mañanas” (song), 188, 262n26 Toña la Negra, 112 Tonta tonta pero no tanto (film), 188 Torres, Mita, 200, 211 Torres Torres, Jaime, 123–24, 158, 162–63, 167

290 Index

­Toyota Rambler Show (tele­vi­sion show), 188–89 Traigo un pueblo en mi voz (Mercedes Sosa ­album), 199 Traigo un pueblo en mi voz (Benítez concert), 199–202, 204, 214–16 “Traigo un pueblo en mi voz” (song), 214. See also “Hermano dame tu mano” transport, relationship to truth, in Benítez, 212, 219 transmission (Kahn), 219, 265n78 Trigo, Benigno, 133 Trulla (educational booklet), 136 Trulla (educational film), 136–38 Tun tun de pasa y grifería (Palés Matos), 73 tv Radio Mirror, 16–17 “Twist and Shout” (song), 173 Ugly Feelings (Ngai), 33 Una hora con nosotros (radio program), 44 Una hora contigo (tele­vi­sion show), 44–47 Un amigo en Chicago (video), 121, 249n2 Un amigo en Nueva York (video), 121, 249n2 “Un jíbaro en Nueva York” (song), 143 “Un lugar para los dos” (song), 173 Un pueblo que canta (tv special), 267n86 Un regalo de alegría (­album), 267n86 utier (Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y el Riego) strike, 218 “Vagabundear” (song), 195 Velasco, María Elena “La India María,” 188 ¡Venceremos! (slogan), 217 Venegas Lloveras, Guillermo, 2–3, 180 “Vete con ella” (song), 174–75, 259n6 Vidaurri, Rita, 123

Vietnam War, Benitez’s criticism of, 6 Villa-­Lobos, Heitor, 98 Villar, Manuel, 32 Villaverde, Cirilo, 84 Vizcarrondo, Fortunato, 72, 119 voice: as embalmed in recording (Sterne), 171; as full emptiness, 37, 63, 79; as gap, 68; Lacan on, 8, 234n13; as part-­object, 8, 41, 45, 66, 229, 238n53; as percussive, 34, 39–40; thinking, definition of, 172–73, 226–27; the “third level” of (Dolar), 59–61 Voice and Phenomenon (Derrida), 12 A Voice and Nothing More (Dolar), 71–72, 234n13, 261n18 The Voice in Cinema (Chion), 28 Vuelven los dos grandes: Calandria con Ramito, vol. 2, 151–54 “Walk on By” (song), 173 Weheliye, Alexander, 206–8 What Is Called Thinking? (Heidegger), 8, 259n2

Wolfe, Tom, 131, 253n27 Won­der, Stevie, 174 Works Pro­gress Administration (wpa), 9 “Yo no cambio a Puerto Rico por quinientos Nueva Yores” (song), 253n27 Yo soy la que soy (­album), 100–101, 108, 111–12 “Yo soy la que soy” (song), 108–9, 111–14, 119 “Yo soy mulata” (song), 111, 113–14 “Yo tengo una cosa” (song), 50, 60 “Y tu abuela onde etá” (song), 72–74, 76–77, 82–83, 113, 119 Yupanqui, Atahualpa, 212–14 Zenón Cruz, Isabelo, 71 Zervigón, Pedro, 218 Žižek, Slavoj, 60 zoe (Agamben), 125, 128, 141, 142 Zona carga y descarga (journal), 196, 199, 204–7, 210–11

Index  291

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